I just started using Inkscape today so apologies if I do not have the basics and jargon down yet. I am on Windows 10.
I am trying to use symbols others have made for my own creations. I started out trying to figure out how to properly relocate a file containing symbols in order to gain access to that new symbol/library, but when that failed, I resorted to manually creating a new symbol/library, only to have that fail as well.
Here's what I did:
I downloaded a .svg file containing all of the symbols I want. if it helps, the document is from gwoptics "ComponentLibrary", and has the name "ComponentLibrary.svg", which I'll use for the rest of this post.
In other programs I have used before in which sharing symbols/components/library parts is possible, I would simply find the symbol/component/library folder and copy/paste the document there. Unfortunately, it seems it was not that simple... Though there is a "lib" folder under C:\Program Files\Inkscape, copying/pasting "ComponentLibrary.svg" to this folder doesn't accomplish anything.
I did a little digging and found a video (using Linux, so it's not exactly the same) that explains how to create your own custom libraries from current designs. This should work, but it's a bit of a roundabout way of doing it, since I have to manually name every single symbol in "ComponentLibrary.svg", but whatever. Annoyingly, that didn't quite work either, simply because my stupid computer won't let me save anythingin the C:\Program Files\Inkscape directory. This is an admin privileges issue, which I cannot fix despite being the owner/only user on this computer and countless internet tutorials, but I won't bother you all with that since it's not uniquely an Inkscape issue.
What do I do??? I can post the video I used to create a new directory if it would help.
tl;dr how do I create a new symbol/library directory containing symbols downloaded from the internet if they're all in a single file?
There is a user profile repository for Inkscape stuff. You can make a symbols directory there and it will still be retained when you next update Inkscape.
NB There may be scale issues unless you set your units to px and set the scale to 1 in the Document Properties. I always save that as my default.svg in my user profile. You can change the document units to whatever after that and not worry about scale.
Beginners' Questions Creating Symbols/Libraries
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Hello,
I just started using Inkscape today so apologies if I do not have the basics and jargon down yet. I am on Windows 10.
I am trying to use symbols others have made for my own creations. I started out trying to figure out how to properly relocate a file containing symbols in order to gain access to that new symbol/library, but when that failed, I resorted to manually creating a new symbol/library, only to have that fail as well.
Here's what I did:
I downloaded a .svg file containing all of the symbols I want. if it helps, the document is from gwoptics "ComponentLibrary", and has the name "ComponentLibrary.svg", which I'll use for the rest of this post.
In other programs I have used before in which sharing symbols/components/library parts is possible, I would simply find the symbol/component/library folder and copy/paste the document there. Unfortunately, it seems it was not that simple... Though there is a "lib" folder under C:\Program Files\Inkscape, copying/pasting "ComponentLibrary.svg" to this folder doesn't accomplish anything.
I did a little digging and found a video (using Linux, so it's not exactly the same) that explains how to create your own custom libraries from current designs. This should work, but it's a bit of a roundabout way of doing it, since I have to manually name every single symbol in "ComponentLibrary.svg", but whatever. Annoyingly, that didn't quite work either, simply because my stupid computer won't let me save anythingin the C:\Program Files\Inkscape directory. This is an admin privileges issue, which I cannot fix despite being the owner/only user on this computer and countless internet tutorials, but I won't bother you all with that since it's not uniquely an Inkscape issue.
What do I do??? I can post the video I used to create a new directory if it would help.
tl;dr how do I create a new symbol/library directory containing symbols downloaded from the internet if they're all in a single file?
There is a user profile repository for Inkscape stuff. You can make a symbols directory there and it will still be retained when you next update Inkscape.
More info here: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/SymbolsDialog
NB There may be scale issues unless you set your units to px and set the scale to 1 in the Document Properties. I always save that as my default.svg in my user profile. You can change the document units to whatever after that and not worry about scale.
That's it! I couldn't find an "AppData" folder under my user file, but it was just hidden. Saving it under "Symbols" works. Thank you!