The Ipe extensible drawing editor

Ipe is a drawing editor for creating figures in PDF or (encapsulated) Postscript format. It supports making small figures for inclusion into LaTeX-documents as well as making multi-page PDF presentations that can be shown on-line with Acrobat Reader.

Ipe's main features are:

Entry of text as LaTeX source code. This makes it easy to enter mathematical expressions, and to reuse the LaTeX-macros of the main document. In the display text is displayed as it will appear in the figure.
Produces pure Postscript/PDF, including the text. Ipe converts the LaTeX-source to PDF or Postscript when the file is saved.
It is easy to align objects with respect to each other (for instance, to place a point on the intersection of two lines, or to draw a circle through three given points) using various snapping modes.
Users can provide ipelets (Ipe plug-ins) to add functionality to Ipe. This way, Ipe can be extended for each task at hand.
Ipe can be compiled for Unix and Windows.
Ipe is written in standard C++ and Lua 5.2.

Ipe downloads are available from SourceForge.

You can find more information about Ipe features in the manual (PDF version).

Wiki

After the manual, your second source of useful information, example files, of answers to frequently asked questions is the Ipe 7 Wiki. The idea is that Ipe users add useful tips and tricks, or anything related to Ipe here.

This Wiki is maintained by Alexander Wolff's group. Thank you!

Mailing lists

There are two mailing lists for Ipe. The first mailing list is used solely to announce new versions of Ipe, and perhaps new ipelets that may be interesting to a broad audience. Traffic on this list is very light, as most messages on this list come from me. You can subscribe to the announcement list here.

The second list is used to discuss Ipe. You can subscribe here. Please don't use it to report bugs—the bug tracker is much better at that.

Both lists are maintained by René van Oostrum. Thank you!

Reporting bugs

To report bugs, please use the Ipe bug tracker (click on Report Issue).

Before reporting a bug, please verify that you have the latest Ipe version, and check that the problem is not explained in the frequently asked questions on the Ipe 7 Wiki. Please do not send bug reports directly to me (the first thing I would do with your report is to enter it into the bug tracker).

Copyright

The extensible drawing editor Ipe is "free," this means that everyone is free to use it and free to redistribute it on certain conditions. Ipe is not in the public domain; it is copyrighted and there are restrictions on its distribution as follows:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Gnu General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

As a special exception, you have permission to link Ipe with the CGAL library and distribute executables, as long as you follow the requirements of the Gnu General Public License in regard to all of the software in the executable aside from CGAL.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the Gnu General Public License for more details.

Downloads

The current version of Ipe is Ipe 7.1.4.

A binary package for your system may have been made available by others, see the Ipe 7 Wiki.

I'm making two downloads of Ipe available on SourceForge: a binary distribution for Windows and a source package that should compile on any recent Unix system.

The source distribution: It includes sources to build Ipe, as well as the Ipe documentation. See the install.txt file for instructions. You may also need the URW Postscript fonts in ipe-urw-fonts.tgz.
Windows binary version: Unzip this package somewhere on your (Windows) computer, but choose a location whose path contains no non-ASCII characters.
Historical version: Ipe 6.0pre32patch1 (April 2009) is the last version of Ipe 6.

Several separate programs are available from SourceForge. These are available in source form (I provide a Windows binary for pdftoipe).

The svgtoipe program: svgtoipe converts SVG figures to Ipe format. It cannot handle everything in SVG, but should work for geometric objects and gradients. This program is actually a Python script.
The pdftoipe program: pdftoipe converts arbitrary PDF files to Ipe's XML format, or at least it tries to. You'll need the poppler library to compile it, or download the Windows binary.
The figtoipe program: figtoipe converts figures made with Xfig to Ipe's XML format. It does not handle all the features of Xfig. figtoipe was improved and is currently maintained by Alexander Bürger. Thank you!
The ipe5toxml program: If you still have figures that were made with Ipe 5, you can use this program to convert them to the format understood by Ipe 6. You can then run ipe6upgrade to convert them to Ipe 7 format. The source to ipe5toxml is in the public domain.