thomas,

thanks for the information. i have been learning much about inkscape since i began using inkscape and having a visual understanding of how the dependencies fit into the program. thanks for the information on the differences in quartz and xquartz. now i won't make that mispeak again since i now have a better understanding of the two.

according to martin, and i concur, that the version valerio is developing is the best version for mac. the official version that corresponds to valerio's version starts terminal and then starts inkscape. as a user, what is the necessity of the middle program? if it works "just" for the mac, then what would be the need to upgrade to gtk3?

and this is where it gets sticky and possibly crazy sounding. to express this and not being able to contribute to the programming really hurts me; but what i'm going to say is not meant to be mean spirited. this would need a community within the developer community to work with valerio and develop a new fork that maintains the same inkscape source code so upgrade features can be "plugged into" the source code.

i guess it would be an "inkscape sub-culture" of the "official version". security proofreaders to check for viruses and malware of all kinds before releasing "official mac only inkscape plugins". once that is resolved, along with resolving the "storage" problem, now the problem of "plugin" distribution enters the picture.

i could go on, but the bottom line is, where do you get the people to begin this chapter of the inkscape saga? i tell you all, as a user, i see the beginnings of what i propose in this discussion; and i'm really excited about the valerio version becoming the new "official mac version". i trust that the inkscape mac group will consider my "user" proposal as a possible road map as the group coalesces, hopefully they will and can work with valerio in developing "the premier industry standard svg program" for mac.

best,

dwain