A difficulty often faced by designers and production artists is the sharing and collaboration of designs and ideas between many people over many computers. Traditionally, such exchange of ideas involved screenshots or repeated email volleys, and would result in many different versions of documents that had to be managed, sorted and merged. Using Inkscape, designers, artists and anyone else who wants to collaborate with others can share documents live over a network instead.
The purpose of this manual is to provide users with guidance on how to use the whiteboard functionality of the Inkscape program. Refer to documentation on the Inscape program itself for help with installation and general usage.
In order to utilize the whiteboard functionality of Inkscape, users must already have registered an account with the Jabber instant messaging service. The Jabber IM protocol is open source and free to use (http://www.jabber.org/). Accounts can be registered and managed using programs such as the open source Gaim (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/). Before attempting to use the Inkscape whiteboard system, users who wish to collaborate should register accounts on Jabber, and add every other to their buddy lists.
| Task | Description |
| Sign in to your Jabber account within Inkscape. | Whiteboards utilize Jabber connections to allow instances of Inkscape to "chat" with each other to share document information. Hence, it in necessary to first connect to a Jabber account. After signing in, you will become visible to other online users that have you on their buddy list, and sharing options will become enabled. |
| Send a whiteboard session invitation to the user you with to share with. | After logging in, one user initiates the whiteboard session by inviting another to receive their currently open document. You can also use an empty document to start a whiteboard session from scratch. |
| Use the whiteboard. | After initializing a whiteboard session, the document is shared between both users. |
To receive a shared document from another user, follow the following steps:
| Task | Description |
| Sign in to your Jabber account within Inkscape. | See the note above. |
| Wait for and accept a whiteboard session invitation from the user you with to share with. | After accepting a whiteboard session, both users will synchronize their documents and begin the session. Once the session has been established notification will be flashed in the status bar. In the first release of whiteboard functionality, sessions are automatically accepted. |
| Use the whiteboard. | After initializing a whiteboard session, the document is shared between both users. |
When you are ready to terminate your whiteboard session, be sure to save your
copy of the document before disconnecting. If desired, you may also log out of
the Jabber server.
Use the "File" drop down menu and select "Connect to Server..." to begin the process. Type in the Jabber server you wish to use (any server is valid, such as jabber.org), your user name, and your password in the text fields provided. The results of the login attempt, successful or not, will be displayed in the status bar.
As described in the Overview of User Types, users should have a Jabber account already ready to use before attempting to log in.
If there are problems with logging in to your Jabber account, try different servers, or use an external program to investigate your account.
After logging in successfully, you will be able to initiate whiteboard sessions, or receive sessions requests from other users.
Use the "File" drop down menu and select "Share with User..." to begin the process. A dialog will be displayed containing all users in your buddy list that are currently online. You may select one of these, or type in one not in this list to send the user a whiteboard invite. After a whiteboard session has been accepted and both users connected, the start of the whiteboard session will be displayed in the status bar.
You must already be logged on to your Jabber account as described in Connecting to a Jabber Server before attempting to start a whiteboard session.
After the other user has accepted, and handshaking has succeeded, the whiteboard session will have been established.
In this first release of the Inkscape whiteboard functionality, session invitations are accepted automatically.
You must already be logged on to your Jabber account as described in Connecting to a Jabber Server before attempting to start a whiteboard session.
Note that the handshaking phase may take a few minutes, depending on the size of the initial document and the speed of the server.
After the other user has accepted, and handshaking has succeeded, the whiteboard session will have been established.
User Interface Screens
After initializing a whiteboard session, the document is shared between both users. Changes that one user makes to the document, such and creating objects, moving them or changing their properties, will be seen by the other connected user. This connectivity will last until the whiteboard session has been terminated.
Two users much be connected as described in Sending a whiteboard session invitation and Receiving a whiteboard session invitation.
User Interface Screens
| Date | Name | Revision |
| 05/15/2005 | Jonas Collaros | Document creation |