Geospatial Solutions Expert: November 2025

Saturday, November 1, 2025

Inkscape for Geo-Scientific Research Publishing: Creating High-Quality Maps & Scientific Figures

It is an observation worth making that the skill of graphics design remains significantly underrated among authors in academic research. This oversight, which can diminish the impact and clarity of scholarly work, is a mistake I initially made myself.

However, I swiftly recognized this deficit and took corrective action by dedicating time to learning an effective, open-source graphics design tool: Inkscape. This choice allowed me to substantially enhance the visual presentation of my research findings, from schematics and diagrams to conceptual figures. The message here is clear: proficiency in graphics design is not merely an optional extra but a critical component of effective academic communication. If this is a skill gap in your own repertoire, be assured that it is not too late to remedy it and immediately elevate the standard of your published work.

To help you accomplished this, I have created a YouTube video series tailored toward using inkscape for making research figures.

Inkscape is a powerful, free, and open-source vector graphics editor suitable for creating figures for geo-scientific research publications, such as journal articles, posters, and illustrations. InkScape is a good choice for authors preparing diagrams and other line art for their manuscript.

Basic steps for making each figure will generally be based on the following

Steps:

Determine the Figure's target size - 2% of design time is expected to be spent here.
Design and Arrange the Figure Components - 95% of design time is expected to be spent here.
Finalize and Export the Figure - 3% of design time is expected to be spent here.

Scientific figures just like the papers are fundamentally constructed by taking existing ideas adapting, applying, and improving them in novel contexts over time. Inkscape can be used for the following:-

Developing original schematic diagrams from conception.
Simplify complex figures from papers for presentation clarity.
Refine and adjust plots exported from programs (e.g., Excel, MATLAB, Python, R, ArcGIS, QGIS).
Annotate photos by adding details like labels, scale bars, arrows, and outlines.
Comprehensive design and production of scientific conference posters.

Some of what you will learn are adapting a research figure, fixing a portion of an existing research figure, preparing confrence posters, designing graphical abstract etc.