Introduction
As we have seen in the previous chapters, Inkscape's standard tools are both flexible and powerful. However, there are many situations in which building everything from scratch is repetitive, time consuming, and prone to errors.
Many modern programming languages provide a standard set of libraries with ready-made functions and classes for connecting to networks, creating user-interfaces, and so on. Similarly, Inkscape follows a "batteries included" (to quote a popular Python motto) philosophy, and ships with a vast library of extensions that are ready to be used immediately.
Extensions can rapidly create complex shapes and guides, manipulate object attributes (such as color), format text, and even perform raster image enhancing. Inkscape 0.48 provides an extensive collection of more than a hundred extensions, and we will explore some of the most useful ones in this chapter.
