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Interfacing with Ipe

Ipe stores drawings in a format that contains the interesting information which it wants to retrieve later in a (keyword, parameter) scheme. Since this format is rather simple, you can adapt your own programs to create Ipe file output, so that you can create a drawing mechanically, and then edit it interactively. In fact, the PLAGEO library by Geert-Jan Giezeman contains drawing routines that create Ipe-compatible input.

Note that this description is not a full description of the Ipe file format. Files written by Ipe not only contain the actual image information, but also interleaved LaTeX and Postscript code, see file format. The format described here is therefore not sufficient to read files written by Ipe, but it is all that is needed to write files for input to Ipe.

Also, if you want to write your own Ipe user macros, you will have to read and write files with Ipe data. The interface file written by Ipe for input into an Ipe user macro is not a full .ipe file, and it does adhere to the description in this chapter. In most cases, you will want to use the little library supplied with Ipe to read and write these interface files, but for completeness and in case you cannot or do not want to use those routines, here is the description of the interface files between Ipe and the Ipe user macros.

  • Preparing input for Ipe
  • The interface files between Ipe and Ipe user macros
  • The different entries in an Ipe format file
  • Creating Ipe files from PLAGEO

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