|  |  | 10 If you have used Ipe 6 before

# 10 If you have used Ipe 6 before

Ipe 7 is not very different from Ipe 6 for the casual user, but there are a number of changes you need to be aware of.

#### File format.

First of all, the file format of Ipe 7 is different, and Ipe 7 cannot open files created by Ipe 6. To reuse an Ipe 6 document in EPS or PDF format, you first need to run the new tool "ipeextract", which will extract the XML stream inside the document and save it as an XML file. An Ipe 6 XML document can then be converted to Ipe 7 format using "ipe6upgrade".

If your figure is figure.pdf, then the command

    ipeextract figure.pdf

will save the XML stream as figure.xml. Then run

    ipe6upgrade figure.xml

which will save your document in Ipe 7 format as figure.ipe. All contents of the original document should have been preserved.

#### Shortcuts.

The keyboard shortcuts of a small number of commands have changed. Check the menu to find out what changes were made. (You can undo these changes by customizing Ipe.)

The mouse shortcuts have changed as well. The right button now opens the context menu. The middle button is only used for pan, because it seems hard to use a scroll wheel for anything else. Select, translate, rotate, scale, and stretch are still available by holding Control or Alt when pressing a mouse button.

#### Absolute attributes.

The user interface no longer switches between displaying symbolic and absolute attribute values. To select an absolute color, pen width, text or mark size, press the little button to the left of the selector box.

#### Void color and pen.

There is no longer a void color for filling, or a void pen for stroking. For each path object, you indicate whether you want it to be stroked, filled, or both. This setting is independent of the stroke and fill color attribute setting. Unlike in Ipe 6, it is no longer possible to have path objects that are neither stroked nor filled (such an object would now be stroked in black).

#### Path properties.

Except for the pen width, path properties are now set in the path property box (below the pen width). Clicking near the ends of the segment turns arrows on and off, clicking at the right end will cycle through the modes "stroke", "stroke & fill", and "fill." The right mouse button will open a context menu that gives you access to all other settings, including the new arrow shape menu, and the new tiling menu. A tiling will hatch the object with a line pattern, but only if is filled. You can define your own arrow shapes and tiling patterns using a stylesheet.

#### Ink tool.

There is a new tool (the one with the brush icon) for drawing path objects using a pen on a tablet PC.

#### Page transition effects.

These now need to be defined in the stylesheet.

#### Ipetopng replaced by iperender.

The program "ipetopng" was replaced by a new tool "iperender," which can render Ipe documents to PNG or SVG format. The latter is very nice for including scalable figures in web pages.

#### Customization.

The Preferences dialog has disappeared entirely. Ipe 7 can only be customized by editing configuration files written in Lua.

#### Mark objects.

Mark objects are now simply symbols defined in a style sheet—there is no actual mark object anymore. Nevertheless, the user interface allows you to use them as in Ipe 6, with the added benefit that you can define your own mark shapes.

#### Clipping paths.

It is now possible to add a clipping path to a group object. The group will only be drawn inside this clipping path.

#### Transparency.

Ipe now supports transparency for text objects and path objects. This feature is not available unless it is enabled in a stylesheet.

#### Presentations.

To make cooler presentations, Ipe now supports gradients (so you can draw glassy balls), and it is possible to use arbitrary Ipe objects as the "bullet" in `itemize` environments.

#### Images on the screen.

Images are no longer shown with reduced resolution on the screen. Cairo can handle images fast enough to make this unnecessary.

#### Bounding boxes.

When a page has several views, Ipe will now compute the same bounding box for each view of the page. This is what you need when you make an animated figure consisting of several views, for instance for use from the "beamer" package.

If you need to force a larger bounding box, you can do so by drawing a rectangle in a layer named "BBOX" and making that layer invisible. (This specially named layer will be included in the bounding box calculation even if it is not visible in any view.)

If you do need independent bounding boxes for each view (as in Ipe 6), create a layer named "VIEWBBOX". Any view in which this layer is visible will receive a bounding box computed for the objects visible in this view only.

#### To crop or not to crop.

In Ipe 6, use of the PDF CropBox was set in the document properties. In Ipe 7 it is determined by the layout set in the stylesheet (and should therefore always be right).