DorkMatter.net

When I first read about the new spiro feature on Andy Fitzsimon’s blog I thought it was so cool I had to have a go.

Spiro is a new feature in development for Inkscape which is an add-on to the Freehand Tool. It modifies your stroke path into spirals giving a very fluid look to curves and lines. Spiro isn’t the only new tool for the next version of Inkscape. There are new filter effects to play with so it really is well worth the hassle of trying development version.

Check out the download page for the most recent builds for your operating system. You’re likely to find the development version pretty unstable so don’t go deleting your copy of 0.46 just yet.

I use OS X 10.4 which currently has no up-to-date downloads available so I’ve had to compile it myself. If you’re in the same position, it’s not as hard as it looks. Read Inkscape’s page on compiling Inkscape on OS X. Make sure you have XTools installed (searching for it in finder will be enough). On my copy of 10.4 it was already installed. If it isn’t, you’ll find it on your installation CD.

I’m going to show you how to download and install this using MacPorts. If you want to use MacPorts for the download instead of installing everything manually, you’ll need a newer version of XTools. I found the correct version on Download.com as it’s no longer available on the Apple Developer Network for 10.4.

For this installation you’ll be using the program Terminal to work from the command line.

Tip: If you’re using the packaged version and get “command not found” when you try running the port command, see this work around. If you already have a .bash file, open it (nano .profile), copy the line inserted by macports and paste it into your .bash_profile and it should now work.

Assuming you got MacPorts up and running, copy and paste this into Terminal. Expect it to take a long time to run. You’ll be required to enter your system password.

sudo port install cairo +pdf boehmgc gtkmm intltool libxslt lcms popt poppler boost gnome-vfs \ libgnomeprintui automake autoconf subversion

Finally, to complete it, run this command:

svn co https://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/inkscape/inkscape/trunk inkscape cd inkscape/packaging/macosx/./osx-build.sh a c b i -s p

Navigate to your new Inkscape directory and into the folder packaging/macosx/ and open the file named Inkscape to run it.

Next: Using Spiro paths.