Ipe— a graphics editor with LATEX integration
Contents
1. and views It works like this You arrange your drawing objects on your page into so called layers Everything you draw will belong to the layer which is currently active and you also can move objects between layers Then you define several views each showing only some of the layers That way you can build each page interactively showing and hiding layers as you switch from view to view The layers pane figure 4 shows you the list of all layers on the current page clearly marking the visible layers and indicating which layer is active By right clicking on a layer name you can access menu that lets you change its properties 1 Insert page Ctri l Figure 3 The Page menu Figure 4 The Layers pane with 5 layers three of them visible in the current view the gamma layer active The above capabilities together with a stylesheet specifying a screen sized page and a large font allow you to create presentations with IPE 4 Advanced Usage 4 1 Other Graphics Formats By default IPE saves all drawings in a special subset of the PDF standard You can also save them in a subset of encapsulated Postscrirt Finally you can save drawings in a special XML based format which has the advantage of being easily editable with a text editor or other XML processing tools at the moment You can insert a raster format images such as JPEG or PNG files into your drawing by choosing Insert Image2. paste it back into Ipz You can also write some of your drawing elements directly in XML in your 10 Figure 7 IPE on Linux editing a file converted from METAPOST using mptopdf and pdftoipe 11 text editor and cut and paste them into an IPE window This way you can create objects with precise coordinates exactly the way you need them without having to carefully select your grid size and carefully click at exactly the right place on the canvas For example pasting lt ipeselection gt lt path stroke 3 5 1 pen normal gt 100 100 m 300 100 1 300 300 1 100 300 1 h lt path gt lt path stroke black pen ultrafat gt 100 0 0 100 200 200 e lt path gt lt text stroke black pos 305 305 type label halign left valign bottom size Large gt alpha_1 lt text gt lt ipeselection gt into an IPE window will create figure 8 The exact syntax can be found in the IPE manual 1 4 4 Ipelets The functionality of IPE can be extended using so called ipelets These are small dynamically loaded pieces of code that interact with IPE and can modify your drawing in some way The IPE system comes with a number of ipelets pre installed for example there are ipelets for aligning objects in various ways for precise stretch and rotation and so forth You can access them through the ipelets menu figure 9 The manual explains how to write your own ipelets u
3. Ips if you snap an object to for example an intersection of two lines and then you move one of the lines so that the intersection changes the snapped object is not going to move and consequently will no longer be snapped to the intersection This is how most vector graphics editors with this kind of snapping work In VRR you can specify a geometric dependency so that for example if you snap an object to an intersection and the intersecting objects move and the intersection changes the snapped object also moves and stays snapped to the intersection The VRR editor can also import and export some additional file formats for example svc For more information on VRR please refer to the manual 2 One major shortcoming of the vRR editor compared to IPE is that it is not cross platform it seems to run only on Linux One thing I really like about IPE is that it works exactly the same way on my Linux system at home as it does on Windows on my office laptop 14 S gt T iS amp lt dS Figure 10 Three simple examples of figures created with IPE for inclusion into a IATEX document 7 Conclusion This article has presented the cross platform IPE drawing editor its main features are tight integration with IAJ EX sophisticated snapping modes extensibility via ipelets easy yet flexible user interface customizable with stylesheets and ability to export commonly used PDF and EPS file formats I find myself choosi
4. The PracTpX Journal 2006 No 2 Article revision 2006 05 12 IpE a graphics editor with IEX integration Jan Hlavacek Email Website Address Abstract jhlavace svsu edu http www svsu edu jhlavace Saginaw Valley State University 7400 Bay Road University Center MI 48710 USA The article talks about author s experiences with the IPE graphics editor The main features of IPE are described as well as some advanced usage In the section 6 a similar editor VRR is mentioned 1 Introduction IPE is a graphics editor which runs on Windows Linux and Mac OS X and is well suited to preparing graphics for ATEX documents In this article I will describe Ipr s features and usage with several examples I first started using IPE sometime in the mid 1990 s when both my wife and I were working on our dissertations at Ohio State University My dissertation 1234567 8 9 Figure 1 An IPE graphic made for a recent presentation was in complex analysis and only included three pictures however my wife s dissertation was in graph theory and included about 200 illustrations We looked for a program that would make it easy to create these pictures and to include them in a TEX document In time we stumbled upon IPE and quickly found out that it completely satisfied our needs The name IPE is an acronym for Integrated Picture Environment referring to the clever file format the editor used To solve the problem of integrat
5. cate or reach the author of the program I gave up converted all my old IPE drawings to Postscript and started learning METAPOST Come the fall of 2004 I decided to upgrade my Debian Linux system from the rather aged stable distribution to the testing distribution When paging through a long list of new packages my eye caught the name ipe Version 6 0pre22 it said At first I was skeptical a different program with the same name I was thinking happens all the time Then I looked at the description 1 This cursor is called fifi after a dog from a popular computer game that runs around your feet in a way similar to the behaviour of this secondary cursor Drawing editor for creating figures in PDF or PS formats Ipe supports making small figures for inclusion into LaTeX documents as well as making multi page PDF presentations There was more and it all sounded sort of like the old Irz except the part about multi page presentations There was also a URL ipe compgeom org I installed the package and visited the web page It turned out that the author Otfried Cheong had completely rewritten Iz getting rid of old legacy code and using the newly available Qt toolkit This meant not only that IPE was easier to use than before but also that thanks to the cross platform Qt toolkit it was now available for UNn1x and its clones including Mac OS X and Winpows There was another important change the old ingenious fil
6. e format that IPE was named after was gone replaced by a new XML based format However in addition to XML Irr can also save files in PDF and encapsulated Postscript formats IPE like many modern tools understands UNIcoDE There were some other changes namely a new multiple page presentation mode which I will describe later 2 Main Features of IPE Figure 2 shows the initial Ire window This screenshot was taken on a WINDOWS system but the Linux version looks very similar Most of the window is occupied by a yellow drawing canvas you can change the color of the canvas to white if you prefer that with a visible grid On top of the window is the usual menu bar and several toolbars 2 In fact IPE can be configured so that every time you save a file in either the PDF or encap sulated POSTSCRIPT format the other format will also be saved automatically which makes it easy for a TEX document and its figures to be processed by both TEX and pdfT X see the Ask Nelly column in this issue for a discussion of various kinds of image files TEX and pdfT X can process Ed File Edit Snap Mode Zoom Layer View Page Ipelets Help m Npe B Ht GES amp void solid gt nomal x nomal abe normal Figure 2 A new IPE window O es wh First is the file toolbar with the usual icons for saving files opening new files cutting and pasting and so forth What you do not find th
7. ere is the print icon you cannot print directly from IPE Zo BI Next is the resolution toolbar You can see and change the current resolution of the canvas changing the resolution will zoom in or out of your drawing An easy way to adjust the resolution is with your mouse scroll wheel there are also several keyboard shortcuts to change the resolution 4 gt x E E 20 Probably the most useful toolbar contains snapping tools Here you can change your snapping mode change grid size and change the angle for angular snap ping The available snapping tools are Vertex snapping shortcut F4 your cursor will snap to the vertices of polygons and polylines marks and centers of circles Boundary snapping shortcut F5 snaps to all lines and curves in your drawing Intersection snapping F6 snaps to intersections of straight lines cur rently IPE does not snap to intersections involving circles arcs or splines Grid snapping F7 on and off independently of snapping you can tog gle grid visibility with F12 Absolute angular snapping F8 this is somewhat harder to explain Ac cording to the manual 1 When angular snapping is enabled the mouse position is restricted to lie on a set of lines through the origin of your current axis system The lines are the lines whose angle with the base direction is an integer multiple of t
8. from the File menu These images will be shown on your IPE canvas unless they are too large In preferences under On screen bitmap resolution you can set the dimensions of the largest image that will be displayed Set this to a smaller value if your computer is slow or does not have much memory Images that are larger than this value will not be displayed by Irr but they will show up in your resulting PDF or EPS file You cannot insert other Postscript or PDF files into Ire drawings Neither can you use IPE to edit an arbitrary EPS or PDF file Only files created by IPE can be edited However IPE comes with a special command line tool pdftoipe This tool converts an arbitrary PDF file into the Ire XML format Unfortunately the conversion does not handle text very well it does work quite well with graphics Figure 5 shows a graph created using METAPOST with the excellent macros developed by Jean Michel Sarlat I converted a METAPOST file to PDF using Hans Hagen s mptopdf and I converted the result of that to the IPE format using pdftoipe The resulting figure needed very little editing in Ire The result of that process is shown in figure 6 Figure 7 shows Ire this time running on Linux editing the file 4 2 Stylesheets Many properties of your picture as well as Ipz s user interface are affected by stylesheets By using different stylesheets you can change such properties as font sizes line thickness colors page size b
9. he snap angle The snap angle can be set in the second box in the Snap toolbar The origin of the axis system can be set using the F1 key and the direction using F2 key You can also set the axis system to be parallel to an existing line in you drawing by pointing at the line and pressing F3 The origin of the axis system is also used as a center of scaling and rotation Automatic relative angular snapping F9 this one is used only when creating a polygon or a polyline It works in the same way as absolute angular snapping except that instead of using the origin of the axis system it uses the last created vertex of your polygon That way you can easily create a polygon or polyline in which all angles are multiples of the snap angle You can use any number of snapping tools together Ry w Blakey Re owt NXNuvoeoondyDd The last visible toolbar is the objects toolbar Use this to select your drawing tool Available tools are select move rotate scale pan text formula paragraph marks rectangles polylines polygons three different ways of drawing arcs three different ways of drawing circles splines and splinegons What most of these tools are for should be fairly obvious to anybody who had previously used any drawing program However here are some notes on the use of these tools in this particular drawing program When you select the pan tool you can drag your canvas around to change which part of yo
10. ill insert a LATEX minipage environment into your picture You can therefore use various IATEX paragraph environments such as center itemize etc The F10 key will insert a minipage that spans the entire width of your page The text will first show the way you typed it including LATEX commands and special symbols When you press Ctr1 L or when you save your file Ire will run IAJ X and display the text the way it will look as a finished picture The Ctr1 E key shortcut will allow you to modify the currently selected object polyline polygon spline circle or text 2 1 The Context Menu One important thing you cannot really see in the default IPE window is the con text menu To get to this menu you press the Ctrl key and right click on any object drawn on your canvas In the context menu you can change various prop erties of the object such as line thickness color text alignment etc depending on the type of object Here you can also find the scissors tool which you can use to cut an object into two separate objects Currently you can cut polylines polygons circular arcs and circles 3 Layers Views and Pages Another nice capability of Irt is its ability to create multi page PDF documents By selecting Insert page from the Page menu figure 3 you add another page to your document Not only can you have multiple pages but each page can have several layers
11. ing pictures with LATEX text and formulas IPE saved all figures in a file that was at the same time a valid 4TgX file and a valid Postscript file The TEX part contained a picture environment with all the text and math positioned in proper places It also contained code for including the file again this time as a Postscript illustra tion with the rest of the drawing You included the file as a regular IATEX file and it took care of everything else Using IPE including and handling pictures turned out to be very easy Another feature of IPE we appreciated perhaps even more than the ingenious file format was IPE s snapping modes In addition to your regular mouse cursor Ire provided another cursor which snapped to various objects in the drawing In addition to the usual snapping to a grid you could make it snap to lines and curves vertices of polygons intersections of curves and on top of that there were two different angular snapping modes All this made IPE very powerful editor for creating mathematical and scientific illustrations Several years later I tried to use IPE on my computer at home which ran the Linux operating system I was able to compile IPE but it simply refused to run It seemed to have some issue with the new version of the X Server and it kept crashing right after starting I was unable to find any information about this problem anywhere on the Internet and for some reason I don t remember why I was not able to lo
12. ng IPE over METAPOST when creating figures in which elements are to be laid out according to a more visual scheme as opposed to a more programmatic or logical scheme that is easier to achieve in METAPOST However thanks to snapping modes and the ability to directly edit the XML code even very precise highly geometric figures can easily be created with Ipr Figure 10 shows few simple examples from one of my recent IATEX documents Thanks to its system of pages layers and views IPE can also be very helpful when creating presentation Two very simple examples of such presentations are accompanying this article References 1 Otfried Cheong The Ire Manual http ipe compgeom org manual pdf 2 The Vrr Team The Vrr User s Manual http atrey karlin mff cuni cz projekty vrr doc man manual 15
13. sing C 12 Q Figure 8 A precise figure created by pasting XML code into Ire window Precise rotate Figure 9 The ipelets menu 13 5 Word of Caution The current version of IPE described in this article is Ipe 6 0 preview 26 It is a great piece of software and it makes my life much easier every time I need to create illustrations to include in TEX documents Other people I know even use IPE to create drawings to include in Microsoft Word and other documents It is easy to use and powerful However as of this writing it hasn t been officially released It does have some bugs and it has been known to break occasionally under high stress testing Usual procedures such as saving your work frequently should be followed when working on complex projects 6 The VRR Editor While working on this article I ran across another editor that seems to have a lot in common with IPE in design and basic philosophy It is the VRR editor available from http atrey karlin mff cuni cz projekty vrr 2 It has snapping ca pabilities similar to IPE s capabilities it uses TEX similarly to IPE it can export drawings in PDF or EPS and so forth It has several features not present in IPE namely it can snap to intersections of splines and circles and it can also cre ate geometric dependencies in a way similar to some popular dynamic geometry software such as Geometer s Sketchpad KIG and others In
14. ur drawing you can see I personally prefer to use the x keyboard shortcut which centers the canvas window around the point your cursor is currently over My approach is to use the scroll wheel to zoom out until I see the whole drawing point at the part I want to work on press x which will center that part and zoom in using the scroll wheel again There are three text insertion modes The first mode is the simple Text label mode You can use TEX commands in your labels including math mode color changes different TEX fonts etc You can load packages and set up definitions in the IAT X preamble which you can edit by going to the Edit menu and choosing Document prop erties When selecting a font be aware that IPE can only use Type 1 or TrueType fonts IPE cannot handle bitmapped Type 3 fonts You can include accented characters or characters from non latin scripts transparently using UniCobeE The graphical user environment of Ire handles UNICODE trans parently Look in the Ire manual 1 for instructions how to set up your document preamble for inclusion of UNrCopE characters into IATRX The second text insertion mode is called Mathematical symbols This is es sentially the same as simple text label except that it is processed by L TRX in the math mode It is actually equivalent to a text label in which everything is enclosed by a pair of dollar signs The third text insertion mode is called Paragraphs This w
15. ut also page background and things 1 Figure 5 Graph created in META Figure 6 Graph processed by POST pdftoipe like a LATEX preamble for your document You can for example have a special stylesheet for presentations in which all fonts are larger all lines are thicker the page is the size of the screen which has a fancy gradient background and uses Lucida Bright or Arev fonts The stylesheets also affect the user interface In IPE you can switch between so called absolute attributes and symbolic attributes When absolute attributes are active you choose colors using a color selection dialog with RGB values and things like line thickness size of arrows fonts etc are specified in point units In symbolic mode which is the default you select colors line thicknesses etc from a list of available names such as red normal fat large etc These names are defined in the stylesheets By loading different stylesheets you can add new options for colors or sizes as well as change the meaning of the already present options 4 3 Cutting and Pasting As with other vector graphics editors in IPE you can cut or copy selected objects from your drawing and paste them into another file or another page of the same file But you can do more than that Ire objects are stored in the clipboard using their XML representation That means you can cut an object from Irr paste it into a text editor window edit it cut it from the text editor and
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