On Tue, 2018-02-20 at 22:45 -0500, Jared Meidal wrote:
About four years ago some discussion occurred around rejuvenating a build system for MacOS. I have since noticed a individual in that discussion has code and build instructions open on Github, and has continued to develop here: https://github.com/valerioa/Inkscape-MacOS-Curated-Build After trying out the build, I like the ability to work without X11 in a native app appearance. I'm not an app developer, but would like to raise attention to this as a project which has gone a long way to benefit Mac users.
This is very interesting. Especially the notes about not being able to effectively contribute to the inkscape project (when we were back on launchpad) we need to invite the developer and maybe spend some of our time on bridging that, especially making sure that her customisations can be accomodated into our master branch without too much extra work.
I recently had a friend at the Harvard Bioinformatics lab who had used Inkscape extensively and loved the project, admit that he had to buy a propritary vector graphics package to do a poster, because Inkscape on Mac was so poor quality.
This was after I asked if he would consider using Inkscape. So, clearly he thought hard about using Inkscape on his Mac.
A second event happened only yesterday at the South End Tech Center, anoutreach community center for underprivillaged kids. They have CnC and other physical project based programming. They are using Inkscape and will continue to, but they're using Mac, Windows and Ubuntu. Ubuntu is clearly th thing that Inkscape works on the best, while Windows is slightly harder because they struggled to get the DXF12 extension to work with the po2edit requirement (I fixed that now) but the Mac version... it was doing some odd things. Like dragging and dropping a symbol would turn it into a raster image (how is that even possible?) and various other issues, menus, keyboard all things that the linked repository claims to fix.
I got my contact there to install via homebrew, it took 6 hours to install but aparently is working much better. So apart from the install time, there's clearly a build that isn't quite so bad out there.
Martin,