One Inkscape Plugin Collection To Rule Them All

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!

37 thoughts on “One Inkscape Plugin Collection To Rule Them All

    1. 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.

      1. 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.

          1. “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.

          1. 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

    1. 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.

      1. 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.

          1. 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.

          2. 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.

    1. 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

  1. 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.

  2. 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!

  3. 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

    1. 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 :)

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