Inkscape is an amazing piece of open source software, a vector graphics application that’s a million times more lightweight than comparable commercial offerings while coming in at the low, low price of free. The software also has plenty of extensions floating around on the Internet, though until now, they haven’t been organised particularly well. The MightyScape project aims to solve that, putting a bunch of Inkscape plugins into one useful release.
The current MightyScape release has a whole bunch of useful stuff inside, for tasks as varied as laser cutting, 3D printing, vinyl cutting, as well as improvements on areas where Inkscape is a bit weak out of the box – like CAD, geometry and patterning. The extensions are maintained and working, albeit with some bugs, and are intended for use with Inkscape 1.0 and above.
The aim is that by creating an overarching collection, the MightyScape project will help inspire the community to come together and actively maintain Inkscape plugins rather than allowing them to wither and die when forgotten by their original creators. That’s the benefit of open-source, after all – you can do whatever you want with the software when you have the code to do so!
Just make certain there’s some kind of security so the repository doesn’t end up as a vector for bad people.
that would be the case for most open source projects in general if you see it that way. ;)
If you want more control over security you can use the inkscape gallery and Inkscape extension manager from Martin Owens.
I am trying to upload extensions in a single way from MightyScape repo there too, but this is a lot of work, especially maintaining them to be recent. So at the moment only ~20 extension are up in gallery.
I don’t know how to install all this stuff. I’ve tried several times, but I have no idea of what I’m doing. I;m asking for help.
oh its easy just install git
and
git clone https://gitea.fablabchemnitz.de/MarioVoigt/mightyscape-1.X.git %appdata%\inkscape\extensions\
im making a point here, this crap is so broken for the average user.
most folks dont know what the hell a github is or repo for that matter. we have got to start being better to end users.
To be fair if you need an Inkscape plugin for generating GCode because you’re not using closed-source tools that do the same thing, you’ve probably used git.
But if you haven’t, you could just click the big download button on the project page and unzip it into Inkscape’s plugins folder.
If you’re making vector art with open source software you probably know how to download a file.
“MightyScape does not work with any releases or feature branches. Just use “git clone” to get the recent commit from master branch.
Please see at https://y.stadtfabrikanten.org/mightyscape-overview for installation tips like required python modules, file locations and other adjustments.”
Have fun reading that.
“the structure of this repo is intended the following way: all extensions which require exactly one *.py and one *.inx file are kept on the top level /mightyscape-1.X/extensions/fablabchemnitz. So just copy them to your Inkscape’s extension directory.”
So for all of those, click the download-repo-as-zip button on github (on the right, looks like a download icon), unzip and copy accordingly.
“All extension which require additional libraries have their own sub directory. You will find redundancies in this repo like node.exe (NodeJS). We did it this way to give easy possibilty to only pick the extensions you want (instead creating ~200 repositories).”
Special steps for those. Understandable, since it would be a big task to wrangle together an easy installer for all those. It is also unlikely that everyone wants all of these diverse tools, so pick the ones you want and do the extra steps.
You can also click on the Download Repository link, choose the Zip file, and then copy and paste from the zip file to the Inkscape extensions folder.
Read The Fine Link. There’s no download link to a nice zip file, only instructions to git clone, checking your paths and updating your Python packages. Fun!
And now we know why Docker is popular.
What’s https://gitea.fablabchemnitz.de/MarioVoigt/mightyscape-1.X/archive/master.zip then? There is a download button on the far right of the bar above file list.
Yeah… MikrySoft’s reply pretty much proves you wrong. Read all the links, not just the fine ones.
the docs are still improving from time to time. It’s a lot of work to fix extension and to test them on Win+Linux + writing down all the requirements. going to make the installation overview cleaner soon
That’s admirable to ask for help. It’s a good first start to learning how to do something new. So I know how to go about helping you, could you tell me what OS you’re running inkscape on? I’m planning on pointing you in the right direction to learn what you need to do this yourself. If that doesn’t sound like the kind of help you want, let me know and I won’t spend time on something you don’t want.
Oops, further down you mention getting further than before. Maybe I don’t need to help then.
I have Windows 10 64 bit installed with the latest updates.
The issue I am running into myself is when I try to run the update function as they show in the instructions, it tells me GitPython isnt installed…. yet I have installed it as instructed.
I am on a Linux Mint build and the directory they show to do the python installations is based on a windows OS. Nothing is stated on where to point the installs for the python files for linux.
Hi,
check if you have python2 and python3. whats your default interpreter? did you adjust the python interpreter in preferences.xml accordingly before using the upgrader on Windows?
#Windows
git clone https://gitea.fablabchemnitz.de/MarioVoigt/mightyscape-1.X.git %appdata%\inkscape\extensions\
#Linux
git clone https://gitea.fablabchemnitz.de/MarioVoigt/mightyscape-1.X.git ~/.config/inkscape/extensions/
I am currently on a linux machine.
What I had to do as some others have done was drag the folders with the extensions into the
~/.var/app/org.inkscape.Inkscape/config/extensions/
folder to get them to show up in Inkscape at all.
Hi Jeff. I updated the docs to clarify some things and added your extension path. seems you have inkscape installed using snap. that uses another dir than default.
Getting the plugins into the folder isnt the issue, but when I try to run the update feature in the extensions installed, I get this error.
Error. GitPython was not installed but is required to run the upgrade process!
Ive followed as close as I can for any steps that may apply for linux, but it doesn’t seem to be working correctly. Is there a specific directory in Linux that these pip commands need to be run in, because under windows it shows to be in a specific directory, but there is nothing shown for linux at all.
Unless they found a way to let Inkscape objects have a size that does _not_ include the width of the lines at their boundaries I’m not interested. This problem is so fundamental that it keeps me from dropping CorelDraw.
Tools > Bounding box to use > Geometric bounding box.
I just tested it with the Align and Distribute dialog.
Wouw! That works (took some googling to find that Tools is under Edit > Preferences).
I think I like Inkscape a lot more now.
The real LPT is always in the comments…
Edit>Preferences>tools> select “geometric bounding box”. Inkscape will now ignore the stroke width for the size of an object.
Implemented a while ago.
Do I need to restart my computer in order for the changes to take effect? I just ran inkscape and the extensions did not appear on the extension list.
Inkscape learns about installed extensions when it starts up.
You can modify an extension afterwards, and it will run the new code, but it has to be there at startup
Just did as the instructions told me, but all inkscape shows me are just the standard installed extensions. Am I doing something wrong?
Is there a link to a definitive porting guide for extensions that work in 0.92 so that they behave in 1.0 and 1.1?
I have two plugins I want to modify, but details of what API changes are needed seem scarce.
There are a lot of changes, as well as Python 2 to Python 3 and the internal changes in Inkscape. If you give me a hint i can have a look on it!
Artboards. All I need.
Ate the gcode tools any better since about 3 years ago when you had to do linked offsets to get a tool path?
I love inkscape. I draw my complete comic with it: https://tapas.io/series/MARB-remastered/info
Comment thread like this are why I love Hackaday. Thanks Mario Voigt for the explanations, clarifications and help. And Gustavo and Socksbot for helping me fix a problem I didn’t have the right words to search and fix until now!
Also doubling down on appreciating the incredible amount of work Mario is doing on this. He’s singlehandedly submitting PRs to update like, every Inkscape plugin on Github to become Inkscape 1.0 compliant
Thanks alot guys! I going to do more stuff. I have a long list of wishes to develop and to fix. I will also try to push more extensions to official Inkscape gallery next months. I see MightyScape more generally as a kind of support backbone to get creative and to get involved with Inkscape extension creation. So hopefully the more people see it the more bugfixes and features get included by people over time. Maybe starting as an extension and then later adopted into Inkscape core at the optimum.
by the way the github repo is open for issue creation. You might put bugs and discussions there if you like. Will try to answer, fix or link to other creators :)