Missing Effects Menu Inkscape

I was trying to do an interpolate operation, and for my surprise there is no “Effects” menu, as the tutorial (ver. 0.48) and the Inkscape  page state.

However, after looking around for a while I found the “Interpolate” effect in other place.

Go to Extensions -> Generate from Path -> Interpolate

I didn’t use the “Effects” menu before, so I don’t know if all of them are moved to the “Extensions” menu. However, now you know where to start looking for.

Fixing textext on Inkscape 0.48

I encounter one problem today. My textext didn’t work on Inkscape 0.48, I get the error

textext.py:55: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead import os, sys, tempfile, traceback, glob, re, md5, copy
Traceback (most recent call last): File "textext.py", line 306, in <module>
raise RuntimeError("Neither pygtk nor Tkinter is available!")
RuntimeError: Neither pygtk nor Tkinter is available!

The error is due to a module depreciated on the python version used on Inkscape, and that Textext uses. However, it was pretty easy to solve.

• First you need to download the python packages that are missing, thanks to David Gleich whom packed everything together, avoiding us the trouble of download them and put the pieces together.
• Unzip them C:\Program Files\Inkscape\python\Lib\site-packages

Then you need to update your textext files,  thanks to Pascal Schulthess for the solution.

• Go to C:\Program Files\Inkscape\share\extensions, and open textext.py file
• Now replace

  import inkex
  import os, sys, tempfile, traceback, glob, re, md5, copy
  from lxml import etree
  

  and replace it for

  import inkex
  import os, sys, tempfile, traceback, glob, re, copy
  import hashlib
  from lxml import etree
  

• And replace this

      def __init__(self, document):
          PdfConverterBase.__init__(self, document)
          self.hash = None
  
      def convert(self, *a, **kw):
          # compute hash for generating unique ids for sub-elements
          self.hash = md5.new('%s%s' % (a, kw)).hexdigest()[:8]
          return PdfConverterBase.convert(self, *a, **kw)
  
      def pdf_to_svg(self):
          exec_command(['pdf2svg', self.tmp('pdf'), self.tmp('svg'), '1'])
  

  for

      def __init__(self, document):
          PdfConverterBase.__init__(self, document)
          self.hash = None
          USE_GTK = False
  
      def convert(self, *a, **kw):
          # compute hash for generating unique ids for sub-elements
          m = hashlib.md5()
          m.update('%s%s' % (a, kw))
          self.hash = m.hexdigest()[:8]
          return PdfConverterBase.convert(self, *a, **kw)
  
      def pdf_to_svg(self):
          exec_command(['pdf2svg', self.tmp('pdf'), self.tmp('svg'), '1'])
  

Restart Inkscape and that would do the work.

Inkscape 0.48

Sorry for my late comment on this but I wasn’t here. Anyhow, the new version of Inkscape is available now!

I’m downloading now, this is what they said about it:

This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings a new Spray tool, multipath editing, superscripts and subscripts in text, as well as numeric control of text kerning, tracking, rotation and more, several new extensions for web developers and first take at adaptive user interface.

The release notes are here. I can’t wait to test it. 💡

Inkscape in Windows Command Line

Inkscape

Inkscape is a great tool to draw excellent pictures, and is open source. Although it has some problems when working in Windows, nevertheless there are plenty solutions.

One of those problems is the command line. In Windows the command line doesn’t give any output because everything is redirected to the stdout and stderr. In the documentation they mention that they are working on it, but there are some solutions already. Is just about wrap Inkscape to other software.

Now that we can see the output when we try to work in batches or simple files you will notice that Inkscape does not produce any results or give some error about the files do not exist. That is because it uses the path of where is installed and not the current directory. To solve this — and avoid writing the full path all the time — we can use the %CD% windows variable which holds the current directory full path. For example to convert the figure.png to eps we will input

inkscape -f "%CD%\figure.png" -E "%CD%\figure.eps"

the inkscape command could be replaced by the command that you use once the Inkscape executable is wrapped to show output, the -f option sets the input file, and the -E option is for set the export as eps file. Note that the %CD% option uses an aditional backslash (‘\’) at the end to create a correct path for the files.