Frequently Asked Questions

1. Where can I get support for Ipe?

   You are already looking at the FAQ - good!

   If you have found a bug in Ipe, please go to Ipe bugzilla. Verify that the bug has not been reported before, and file a bug report. (If the bug has been reported before but is not fixed yet, you can add additional information to the existing bug report that would help me solve the problem.)

   If you need help compiling or using Ipe, please post on the Ipe discussion list.

   If you want to say how much you love Ipe, you can either leave a review on SourceForge, or send me email directly. But please note that I hardly ever reply directly to Email about Ipe.

2. The Windows binary does not work - 'cairo.dll' is missing!

   Please follow the instructions in the readme.txt file included with the Windows binary download. In addition to ipe-7.x.y-win.zip, you also need ipe-7.0.0-dependencies-win.zip, which contains DLLs of the libraries that Ipe depends on. These dependencies are distributed separately because they are large, and change only rarely.

3. When including a PDF figure created by Ipe with Pdflatex, it uses more than a page.

   You document uses a stylesheet that sets the crop attribute of the layout tag to "no". This is done for presentations where the paper should not be cropped. So check your stylesheets.

   Alternatively, use \pdfpagebox5 in your document's preamble. See the section "Using Ipe figures in LaTeX" in the manual for details.

4. I want more/other choices for colors!

   The colors available in the drop-down box are taken from your document's stylesheets (like any other symbolic attribute--see the section on symbolic attributes in the manual).

   To have more colors available, you can either add a new stylesheet, or modify the basic stylesheet added to new documents by Ipe. See the manual section on Stylesheets.

5. When I click on a line, the line attributes (thickness, arrow head etc.) don't update in the "Properties"--they remain as they were set.

   I know that Microsoft software has his behavior, but I don't like it, and Ipe won't adopt this. It would cause users to inadvertently reuse the properties of objects they had previously selected, instead of the standard settings they started with (and wanted).

   Note that this is not a problem in, say, Microsoft word: When you click somewhere to start typing text, the toolbar will revert to the settings active at this spot of the document. This 'reverting' wouldn't be possible in Ipe.

6. How do I use Ipe figures in beamer?

   If you make an animated figure in Ipe (that is, an Ipe page with several views), you can use it in beamer like this:

     \includegraphics<1>[page=1]{ipefig}
     \includegraphics<2>[page=2]{ipefig}
   

   You may also like Suresh's tip on this topic.