Installing Skencil
==================

$Date$
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These installation instructions are divided into two parts. The first
part describes the third party software you need for Skencil. The second
part describes the installation of Skencil itself.

If you've installed Skencil before you might want to go directly to the
Skencil specific instructions.

If you're installing on Linux, there are some platform specific notes
about necessary packages and binaries of Skencil, Python et al. at the
end.

Build and installation instructions for Windows can be found in
INSTALL-w32.txt


Installing the third party software
===================================


1.  Install GTK and GLib
--------------------------

GTK and Glib are availe from http://www.gtk.org/. Sketch needs at least
version 2.2.


2.  Install Python
--------------------------

Python is available from its WWW home page: <http://www.python.org/> or
via ftp from <ftp://ftp.python.org/pub/python/>. See Python's
documentation for installation instructions.

Alternatively, you can use the rpm-packages available at
http://andrich.net/python.

You need at least version 2.2.


3.  Install the Python Imaging Library (PIL)
----------------------------------------------------

This library is available from <http://www.pythonware.com>. See the
accompanying documentation for installation instructions. The
installation instructions of PIL versions 1.0b1 and earlier seem to
state that you have to build PIL in the Python source tree; this is not
true, you can build them anywhere you like if you have a complete Python
installation, including all the development files.

One point not mentioned in the PIL installation instructions are the
headerfiles (.h files). For easier configuration of Skencil I recommend
to install the following files found the libImaging subdirectory into
the Python include directory:

     ImConfig.h  ImPlatform.h  Imaging.h

(e.g. if your Python include directory is /usr/include/python2.2, put
them there as well).

You need at least release 1.0 of PIL. Older versions will not work,
because as of Skencil 0.7.6, PIL will be used as a package.


4. Install PyGTK
----------------

PyGTK, the Python bindings for GTK are available from http://pygtk.org/.
You need at least version 2.0


5. Optional: Python XML package
-------------------------------

This step is optional. The XML package is only needed by the SVG import
filter. If you don't know what XML is or SVG, just skip this step. It is
not needed for normal use of Skencil.

If you want to test the SVG import filter, you can get the source of the
XML package at: http://www.python.org/topics/xml/download.html



Installing Skencil:
===================

Skencil is installed with the setup.py script which uses Python's
distutils package.

For Skencil to work with fonts you also need the font-metrics for the
PostScript standard fonts. I've left them out of the development archive
to save some space since they don't change.

You can get these font-metrics from Skencil's webpage or from a stable
Skencil version. Just copy or link the .afm files from the directory
Resources/Fontmetrics of your stable Skencil or the sketch-data archive
to the same directory in the development source tree.


Method 1: setup.py
==================

Skencil comes with a script setup.py that can be used to configure, build
and install Skencil on your System. The normal way to invoke this script
is:

    $ python setup.py <command> [options...]


Some of values for <command> are detailed below.  Run

    $ python setup.py --help

to get more information about how to invoke the script and he available
commands.


Building Skencil
----------------

To build Skencil use the build command of the setup script

    $ python setup.py build

This will compile skencil to be used directly in the build directory and
you can then start it as described below.

One problem you may run into is that Skencil needs to access the Python
Imaging Library from C, so it needs to know where its headerfiles are.
Unfortunately there's no standard place where they are installed, but if
you've installed them as described under 'Install PIL' above the
setup.py script will find them automatically.  If the headerfiles are in
a non-standard location you can use the build_ext command instead and
provide the directory explicitly:

    $ python setup.py build_ext --include-dirs=<dir>

where <dir> is the appropriate directory


Installation
------------

In this development version it's not recommended to really install
Skencil on the system.  Normally this would be done with setup.py's
install command, but that's not implemented properly yet.



Starting Skencil
================

Now you can test Skencil from the topmost directory by running

     $ python skencil.py

or

     $ ./skencil.py

if your Python interpreter is somewhere in your $PATH.