Hello, I was having installation and font problems with Inkscape on Snow Leopard. Here's what I had to do to get up and running.

I installed the latest stable release on SL and it wouldn't start up. I had to get the latest development release as follows:

- Download Inkscape-21714-10.5-i386.dmg (01-Jul-2009 release) here: http://inkscape.modevia.com/macosx-snap/
- Install

I then ran Inkscape and opened a document created on the old version running on Tiger, but common fonts like Helvetica Neue and Zapf Dingbats weren't rendering. /var/system.log shows an error: "Family name Helvetica Neue does not have an entry in the font lister."

So:

- Open Finder and navigate to Applications
- Right-click on the Inkscape application icon and select "Show Package Contents"; this shows all the resource files in Inkscape.app
- Navigate to Resources/etc/fonts and open the file fonts.conf in a text editor
- Find the section in fonts.conf under "<!-- Font directory list -->." This lists the places Inkscape looks for fonts but "/System/Library/Fonts" is commented out and this is where Helvetica Neue (and most fonts) live on my Snow Leopard installation.
- Uncomment the "/System/Library/Fonts" line (meaning: remove the preceding and following characters so it looks just like the lines above and below it)
- Save the file, restart Inkscape and--in my case at least--this fixes the font problem

I read all about the fontforge app font replacements, etc. (which sure sounds like a lot of work) but in my case this wasn't the problem--Inkscape simply wasn't seeing where many of my fonts were installed.

opt wrote:Download Inkscape-21714-10.5-i386.dmg (01-Jul-2009 release) here: ...

This is not[*] the latest build of Inkscape 0.46+devel: get the prerelease build Inkscape 0.47pre1-2 Leopard from http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/files/inkscape/0.47pre1/

opt wrote:but "/System/Library/Fonts" is commented out

There certainly is a reason why one of the osx-package maintainers commented out that font directory - many of the fonts in '/System/Library/Fonts' can't be handled by the pango libraries which Inkscape uses for the font rendering. It is still safer to follow the FAQ and convert those fonts that you need to TTF and store them in a separate folder that is used by the X11 font system only (e.g. ~/.fonts).

hth, ~suv

* [edit content="clarification"]
I have to admit I erred here - r21714 (modevia.org) and r21720 (sf.net) are not that far apart in regard to the source code revisions - but they have been built on different machines and - as far as I know - the prerelease build is based on more recent gtk and other shared libraries versions. But the difference when running on SL is certainly smaller than I assumed without actually checking the revision numbers. Sorry!

On the other hand the much newer prerelease build 0.47pre2 should be up any day now ;-)
[/edit]

... hhmmm, this reminds me of some problems I had with building GIMP on OS X. Just as a hint:

If Inkscape is compiled and linked against the XQuartz libraries, this might be the cause, why it fails on Snow Leopard. AFAIR, XQuartz 2.4.0 isn't compatible with SnowLeopard's X11 libraries. (I've read something about tis on the XQaurtz developer mailing list) So if you compile under Leopard and link against the standard Leoapard X11 libraries (or against the 10.5 SDK) Inkscape should run on Leopard and on SnowLeopard.

-skl

The issue with old builds of Inkscape 0.46 on SL are mainly incompatible library versions ( as Inkscape uses (or used until yesterday) DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH and not a system of recreated links to a static location in /tmp ).

-skl wrote:compile under Leopard and link against the standard Leopard X11 libraries

this is no longer supported by MacPorts (Jeremy changed all ports to definitely use MacPorts X11 shared libraries, removing the +system_x11 variant globally) four months ago. If you pull a current tree of MacPorts and all Portfiles today, all X11 releated linking (during compile) happens inside MacPorts.

AFAIU the next XQuartz release 2.4.1 for Snow Leopard will no longer install into '/usr/X11' but use a separate path as well: see X11-users mailing list discussions since SL release, e.g. http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2009/Sep/msg00016.html. I don't know yet if this will change anything for packages like GIMP, Wireshark and Inkscape (or other ported and bundled GTK+ applications).

~suv

~suv wrote: (Jeremy changed all ports to definitely use MacPorts X11 shared libraries, removing the +system_x11 variant globally) four months ago. If you pull a current tree of MacPorts and all Portfiles today, all X11 releated linking (during compile) happens inside MacPorts.

... that was one of the reasons why I decided to use a separate repository. Being able to compile against system X11 libraries.
(as MacPorts 1.8 changed some variables I'll have to adpot my ports tree to 1.8, but this should be straightforward.)

-skl

~suv wrote:the much newer prerelease build 0.47pre2 should be up any day now ;-)

get it from <http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/files/inkscape/0.47pre2/> - uploaded 11 hours ago ;-)