Hi, I've been wanting to use Inkscape for quite some time now but unfortunately the X11 version is seriously broken and I let the native installation do it's magic for about 3 days at which point I decided not to continue torturing my laptop and ended the install early. Is there anywhere I can just download a prebuilt native install?

pwolfinger wrote:but unfortunately the X11 version is seriously broken

I cannot confirm that and AFAICT several Mac users active here in the forum won't either. Did you work with the latest bug-fix releases (0.48.1, 0.48.2), or report what seems so broken on your system, or ask about it here (or on the users mailing list, or the 'Answers' section at Launchpad, or maybe dropped by in the IRC channel (#inkscape on freenode))? Or is using X11-based applications just not going to work for you (due to insufficient desktop integration or just because the GUI looks different)?

pwolfinger wrote:Is there anywhere I can just download a prebuilt native install?

Not one provided by the Inkscape project (neither a stable release version nor a recent development snapshot build) [1]. Even if you somehow managed to build it (unpatched) via MacPorts (using the +no_x11+quartz variants of gtk2, cairo, pango), I would not recommend it for productive use: see for example here for a status report (from a non-developer's POV) - not much has changed since (except a few of the patches listed in the blueprint merged into the current development branch). The global menubar in the current code base has never been updated and is seriously broken by now (probably due to changes in the rest of the code base), and there has been no recent work committed to the development branch to fix it (or integrate newer versions of ige-mac-menu.*). Other issues (modifiers for accelerators and mnemonics, clipboard, etc.) need to be addressed upstream for the Quartz backend of GTK+.)


[1] There appears to be a DMG (GTK+/Quartz) for download here, but it's not provided by the Inkscape project (I have no further information about the site).
I haven't tested the 0.48 package available there now (IIRC I had downloaded an earlier version from there (0.47?) but it didn't even launch on my system), and if the global menu has not been removed from the sources before building it, you will likely see a lot of crashes when using some of the menu commands, when opening multiple windows/documents or saving a new document, have none of the submenus available, etc. Again - it is unstable and experimental at best (IMHO, and based on my experience - testing local builds of the development branch with GTK+/X11 as well as GTK+/Quartz).

~suv wrote:

pwolfinger wrote:but unfortunately the X11 version is seriously broken

I cannot confirm that and AFAICT several Mac users active here in the forum won't either. Did you work with the latest bug-fix releases (0.48.1, 0.48.2), or report what seems so broken on your system, or ask about it here (or on the users mailing list, or the 'Answers' section at Launchpad, or maybe dropped by in the IRC channel (#inkscape on freenode))? Or is using X11-based applications just not going to work for you (due to insufficient desktop integration or just because the GUI looks different)?

pwolfinger wrote:Is there anywhere I can just download a prebuilt native install?

Not one provided by the Inkscape project [1]. Even if you somehow managed to build it (unpatched) via MacPorts (using the +no_x11+quartz variants of gtk2, cairo, pango), I would not recommend it for productive use: see for example here for a status report (from a non-developer's POV) - not much has changed since (except a few of the patches listed in the blueprint merged into the current development branch). The global menubar in the current codebase is seriously broken, and there has been no recent work committed to the development branch to fix it (or integrate newer versions of ige-mac-menu.*). Other issues (modifiers for accelerators and mnemonics, clipboard, etc.) need to be addressed upstream for the Quartz backend of GTK+.)


[1] There appears to be a DMG (GTK+/Quartz) for download here, but it's not provided by the Inkscape project (I have no further information about the site).
I haven't tested the 0.48 package available there now (IIRC I had downloaded an earlier version from there (0.47?) but it didn't even launch on my system), and if the global menu has not been removed from the sources before building it, you will see a lot of crashes when using menu commands, when opening multiple windows or saving a new document, have none of the submenus available, etc. Again - it is unstable and experimental at best.

Well, mostly the problem I have is that X11 apps not only don't integrate very well with OS X but also the performance drop is pretty much unmanageable.

Oh, boy. So basically my only option is X11 or nothing? Jeez. How's integration with Linux - can I just download it like any other Linux app? I might just virtualize a very low-cut Linux distro and use Inkscape in that for now if I can't do it any other way.

pwolfinger wrote:Well, mostly the problem I have is that X11 apps not only don't integrate very well with OS X but also the performance drop is pretty much unmanageable.

Please allow me to insert a personal comment in reply to this: Please reconsider the words you use to publicly describe your problems with Inkscape on Mac OS X: "seriously broken" is very different from "don't integrate very well with OS X".
Secondly, the performance issues are present in Inkscape on all platforms (not related or limited to running under X11 on OS X), and the next major release 0.49 with the new renderer will have great improvements in that regard (see also an earlier reply in a related topic here in the forum).

pwolfinger wrote:can I just download it like any other Linux app?

Most modern Linux distributions have Inkscape 0.48 in their repositories (i.e. easily installed via package management).
The Inkscape project itself does not provide pre-built (binary) packages for linux for download (but plans are to set up a PPA for stable releases, as has been done for the nightlies (unstable development snapshots) from trunk).