Script extensions

From Inkscape Wiki
Revision as of 02:33, 22 January 2006 by Conversion script (talk) (link fix)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Introduction

Inkscape provides the ability for its functionality to be extended using traditional unix scripts. By this, we mean a program that takes in a stream of data through standard in, and then outputs that data on standard out. This is a very easy way to expand Inkscape, and provide custom functionality, without learning the internals of Inkscape. Plus, there are SVG read and writing libraries out there for almost any language, and the rest of them all have XML support (which is really what you probably want to use anyway). This HOWTO discusses the ends and outs of writing one of these scripts and getting it to work with the Inkscape core functionality.

Types of scripts

Basically there are three functions that added with a script:

  • Input, providing translation from a file format to SVG
  • Output, providing translation from SVG to a format
  • Filter, taking in SVG, changing it, and then outputing SVG

While all of these are very similar in the scripting interface, there are slight differences between them.

Interaction

It is important for a script author to understand how Inkscape and scripts communicate.

(interpreter)? your_script (--param=value)* /path/to/input/SVGfile | inkscape

Inkscape runs your script (optionally with an interpreter) passing it any number of parameters in long gnu style. The final argument is the name of the temporary svg file your script should read. After processing, the script should return the modified svg file to inkscape on STDOUT.

Description

In order for Inkscape to make use of an external script or program, you must describe that script to inkscape using an INX file. See the inkscape share directory for examples.

Installing

Installing is as simple as copying the script (unless it resides in your path) and its INX file to the inkscape/share/extensions (home/.inkscape/extensions) directory.

If you are looking to use scripts that have already been written, the most difficult part will likely be the installation. Since scripts are seperate programs they may have any number of dependencies that are not included with inkscape. Currently, the best way to find missing dependencies is by reading the error messages produced by running the script from the command line.

See Also