4 General ConceptsTop2 About Ipe files3 Command line options and auxiliary programs

3 Command line options and auxiliary programs

Ipe command line options

Ipe supports the following two options:

-sheet style sheet name
Adds the designated style sheet to any newly created documents.
-geom WxH+X+Y
Places the Ipe main windows at the desired position and size. (Note the slight difference with the standard Unix option -geometry).
In addition, you can specify the name of an Ipe file to open on the command line. Finally, Ipe also understands some standard X11 options on Unix (this is support built into the Qt library, see there for details).

ipetoipe: converting Ipe file formats

The auxiliary program ipetoipe converts between the different Ipe file formats:

  ipetoipe ( -xml | -pdf | -eps | -ps ) [ -export ] infile outfile
  ipetoipe -png <page> <resolution> infile outfile
For example, the command line syntax
  ipetoipe -pdf figure1.eps figure1.pdf
converts figure1.eps to PDF format.

When you use the -export flag, no Ipe markup is included in the resulting output file. Ipe will not be able to open a file created that way, so make sure you keep your original!

With the option -png ipetoipe converts a page of the document to a bitmap in PNG format. (Of course the result contains no Ipe markup, so make sure you keep your original.) For instance, the following command line

  ipetoipe -png 3 150.0 presentation.pdf pres3.png
converts page 3 of the Ipe document presentation.pdf to a bitmap, with resolution 150.0 pixels per inch.

pdftoipe: Importing Postscript and PDF

You can convert arbitrary Postscript or PDF files into Ipe documents, making them editable. The auxiliary program pdftoipe converts (pages from) a PDF file into an Ipe XML-file. (If your source is Postscript, you have to first convert it to PDF using Acrobat Distiller or ps2pdf.) Once converted to XML, the file can be opened from Ipe as usual.

The conversion process should handle any graphics in the PDF file fine, but doesn't do very well on text--Ipe's text model is just too different.


4 General ConceptsTop2 About Ipe files3 Command line options and auxiliary programs