Now that you can navigate your way around the canvas, let’s have a closer look at the tools available for creating objects.
Looking down the main toolbox, the first object-creating tool you see is the Rectangle tool. This and the next four tools—3D Box, Ellipse, Star, and Spiral—are collectively called shape tools, and the objects they create are called shapes.
A shape is a geometric object which you can not only move, scale, or rotate (as you can any other object) but also edit in some ways specific to its type. For example, a rectangle can have rounded corners; an ellipse can be turned into a segment (pie-slice shape) or elliptic arc; a 3D box can be moved and resized in its own 3D space. We will talk about shapes in Chapter 11; for now, choose any of the shape tools and start drawing on the canvas. Each mouse drag, from press to release of the left mouse button, creates a new shape.
Next down in the toolbox are the Pencil and Pen tools. Both create arbitrary paths, but do so differently. The Pencil tool works just like a real pencil: You draw on the canvas, and it leaves behind a trace. (Note that the trace is not exact; it’s a bit smoothed out compared to the actual mouse trajectory.)
The Pen tool is more complex; it assumes that you understand how paths are composed of nodes connected by linear or curved segments. For now, just click several times with this tool at different points (this creates linear segments between click points), then click and drag a few times, and finally press 
to finish the path. Both Pencil and Pen by default create paths with thin black stroke but no fill. We’ll discuss these tools in Chapter 14.
The next two tools, Calligraphic pen and Paint bucket, also create paths, but unlike Pencil and Pen, they by default produce filled paths without stroke. The Calligraphic pen is one of the most versatile tools in Inkscape; its many options and parameters allow it to imitate not only calligraphic pen (which was its original purpose), but also various brushes and many other drawing implements and behaviors (some of which have no counterpart in the real world). This is the primary tool of those who use Inkscape to simply draw (Chapter 14).
The Paint bucket tool is also a great help for a cartoonist or illustrator. Just as you’d expect, it fills in any bounded area, creating a filled vector path. For practice, draw around a closed area with several brush strokes of the Calligraphic pen, then click inside with the Paint bucket. (If you click in an unbounded area, the tool will fail to fill it and say so in the status bar.)
Finally, the Text tool creates and edits text objects. Creating a new text object is as simple as clicking anywhere and starting to type. Or, you can click and drag, in which case you’re creating a flowed text object that will automatically wrap when you type up to the right edge. Editing an existing text object is just as easy: Click it with the Text tool to position the cursor and use all the familiar text editing keys (the arrow keys, 
, 
, 
, and so on). The Text tool is the subject of Chapter 15.
And what if you need to have a raster object, such as a photo, in your SVG document? This is done not with a tool but by the Import command in the File menu. Just select any raster image file (JPG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF all work), and it will be inserted into your document. It will, however, remain a raster; for ways to convert it to vector objects, see 18.6 Bitmap Filters.