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<title>Ipe Manual -- 15 If you have used Ipe 5 before...</title>
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<table width="100%" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=2><tr><td bgcolor="#99ccff"><a href="manual_41.html"><img border="0" alt="16 History and acknowledgments" src="next.png"></a></td><td bgcolor="#99ccff"><a href="manual.html"><img border="0" alt="Top" src="up.png"></a></td><td bgcolor="#99ccff"><a href="manual_35.html"><img border="0" alt="14 The Ipe file format" src="previous.png"></a></td><td align="center" bgcolor="#99ccff" width="100%"><b>15 If you have used Ipe 5 before...</b></td></tr></table>
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<h1>15 If you have used Ipe 5 before...</h1>
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<p>...you may be shocked about some of the new developments in
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Ipe 6. In particular, the clever Ipe file format that gave Ipe its
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name has disappeared. (You do remember, of course, that Ipe used to
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stand for "Integrated Picture Environment", because Ipe files were
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at the same time legal Latex source code and Postscript files.)
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<p>Ipe 6 simply writes Postscript or PDF files. It still maintains text
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objects as Latex source, and you edit text objects by editing Latex
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source, but before creating an Ipe file, Ipe runs Pdflatex and stores
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the resulting PDF representation in the file. This is a much better
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solution, as Ipe figures now require no special handling. You no
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longer have to add page-long explanations when you send Ipe files to a
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co-author or publisher. The new approach was made possible by two
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important developments that have happened since 1993, when I first
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wrote Ipe. First, all relevant Latex fonts are now available as
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scalable Type1 fonts, and so it is possible to embed Latex text and
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formulas in figures that may still need to be scaled later. Second,
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Hàn Thê Thàn's pdfTeX, a version of TeX that produces PDF instead of DVI
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output, makes it possible for Ipe to extract the processed text
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objects from a Latex run and to include them in its own output.
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<p>The Ghostscript window is also no longer necessary, as Ipe can now
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render text objects the way they will look on paper. There are no
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longer separate Ipe and Mipe modes--any Ipe document can contain one
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or more pages. PDF doesn't have the restriction to single-page
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figures, and so you can create a single Ipe document containing all
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the figures for an article, and then include them one by one.
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<p>Perhaps you are worried now that you cannot continue to use your
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megabytes worth of existing Ipe figures with Ipe 6. Fear not. Ipe 6
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comes with a tool "ipe5toxml" that converts figures created with
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Ipe 5 and earlier to Ipe 6's <a href="manual_35.html">XML format</a>. (There was
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no question that Ipe 6 would have to be able to communicate in XML, of
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<p>Other than the file format, there weren't really that many changes to
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Ipe's functionality between Ipe 5.0 and Ipe 6.0 preview 3. I've added
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style sheets and layers, because René van Oostrum says that no
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self-respecting drawing program can do without. I've added page
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views, which allow you to incrementally build up a page in a PDF
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presentation, because Christian Knauer wants to make PowerPoint-like
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presentations in Ipe. And obviously it's now possible to use Korean,
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Chinese, and Japanese in figures.
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<p>I've also revised the interface to ipelets (which used to be called
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"Iums" in the good old times when people still thought that
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"applets" were small apples)--it is now based on dynamically loaded
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libraries (a technology that was still somewhat poorly understood ten
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years ago, at least by me). Ipelets are now much more powerful than
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they used to be, but buggy ipelets can also crash Ipe much more easily
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than in the past. Well, you can always do the real work in a separate
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<p>Finally, Ipe 6 has been rewritten from scratch in clean, beautiful,
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object-oriented C++. Quite unlike the previous version. Oh, and
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there's a Windows version of Ipe now. Who would have thought that ten
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<table width="100%" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=2><tr><td bgcolor="#99ccff"><a href="manual_41.html"><img border="0" alt="16 History and acknowledgments" src="next.png"></a></td><td bgcolor="#99ccff"><a href="manual.html"><img border="0" alt="Top" src="up.png"></a></td><td bgcolor="#99ccff"><a href="manual_35.html"><img border="0" alt="14 The Ipe file format" src="previous.png"></a></td><td align="center" bgcolor="#99ccff" width="100%"><b>15 If you have used Ipe 5 before...</b></td></tr></table></body></html>
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