Installation

Basic Installation

Inkscape version 0.92 and newer can be build using CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make install

Other platforms such as Windows and Mac require a lot more and are considered a developer and packager task. These instructions are kept on the Inkscape wiki.

Running Without Installing

For developers and others who want to run Inkscape without installing it please see the Building section in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Required Dependencies

The Inkscape core depends on several other libraries that you will need install, if they are not already present on your system. The most typical libraries you may need to install are:

• Boehm-GC
• libsigc++
• gtkmm

Please see the wiki page on compiling Inkscape for the most current dependencies, including links to the source tarballs.

Extensions

All Inkscape extensions have been moved into their own repository. They can be installed from there and should be packaged into builds directly. Report all bugs and ideas to that sub project.

Inkscape Extensions

They are available as a sub-module which can be updated independently:

git submodule update --remote

This will update the module to the latest version and you will see the extensions directory is now changes in the git status. So be mindful of that.

Build Options

A number of configuration settings can be overridden through CMake. To see a list of the options available for Inkscape, run:

cmake -L

or, for more advanced cmake settings:

cmake --help

For example, to build Inkscape with only SVG 1 support, and no SVG 2, do:

cmake .. -DWITH_SVG2=OFF

Or, to build Inkscape with debugging symbols, do:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..