Most vector images start or end (sometimes both) their lives as bitmaps (1.1 What Vector Graphics Is and Why It Matters), and Inkscape’s SVG documents are no exception. Many vector drawings, artistic as well as technical, are developed from tracings of photos, scans, or other bitmap drawings; at the other end of its lifetime, almost all vector art is eventually exported into bitmap formats for viewing in software that cannot deal directly with vectors. Bitmaps are an important object type in Inkscape, and the techniques for dealing with them are sufficiently versatile to warrant a whole chapter to cover them.