JMM’s Inkscape notes

Just some personal notes, or a cheatsheet, on using Inkscape.

Note for other people: I usually use Inkscape and Emacs in conjunction, and I’ve made my own (as-of-yet undocumented) library called jmm-inkscape.el for using them together. It basically relies on D-Bus communication, though Inkscape’s D-Bus interface recently was updated. Some of the org.gtk.Actions for Inkscape are located in src/actions/. Like here’s an example of actions defined in actions-selection.cpp.

Command line

See https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Using_the_Command_Line.

Exporting a PNG

Here’s how you’d export a PNG with a white background and a width of 500px.

inkscape yourfile.svg --export-type=png --export-width=500 --export-background=white

It’ll make a file named yourfile.png by default.

SVG to PDF

Here’s how you’d export an SVG to a PDF:

inkscape --export-type=pdf --export-filename=output.pdf input.svg

Note the --export-type=pdf isn’t actually necessary, but I think it ensures that the export-filename has the right extension.

Tips

Editing defs or markers

Editing markers or symbols (which are in the <defs> section) can be slightly annoying. One tip is to replace a def’d ID with a <use> element pointing to some group (e.g. <g>), which you can then edit. You may also be able to have the <use> point to an external SVG.

(TODO: Show an example of this.)

Issues

Some issues I’ve run into with Inkscape:

For some reason, trying to export SVGs in Inkscape 1.2.1 with NixOS 22.11 in GNOME causes Inkscape to crash. What’s weirder is that it actually does successfully export a PNG, but seemingly crashes after that. This seems to happen with GNOME specifically, and not when I’m running under Sway.

The error looks like the following:
```
Emergency save activated!
Emergency save completed. Inkscape will close now.
If you can reproduce this crash, please file a bug at https://inkscape.org/report
with a detailed description of the steps leading to the crash, so we can fix it.
** Message: 12:00:00.000: Error: Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now.
```
(This error was seen on 2023-09-18)
Inkscape can take sometimes hang on startup for me. I think this was caused by Inkscape trying to load previews of all installed fonts. This issue is tracked at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/841.

I think the workaround I used for it was to close a fonts dialog, or maybe there was another preference I set so it doesn’t try to preview fonts.