Inkscape

Inkscape windows disappear when attempting to open a file.

Asked by Adam

Inkscape itself opens fine. When I try to open an existing SVG file, though, the existing window will disappear and it will not show a new window with the file. Looking at the X11 Windows menu, it says the window exists. Clicking on it in that menu does not bring it up. I am running latest versions of XQuartz and Inkscape on Mavericks.

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su_v
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su_v (suv-lp) said : 		#1

Do you happen to use a multi-monitor setup?

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Best su_v (suv-lp) said : 		#2

Possibly the document window opens outside the current screen / space and is not accessible due to a known conflict of XQuartz and Mavericks' changed multi-monitor setup wrt to spaces:
- Bug #1244397 “OS X Mavericks/XQuartz: limited support for multi-monitor setups”
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1244397>
This is a problem which needs to be fixed by Apple in a future update for Mavericks. There are workarounds described in the comments of that bug report.

If changing the system settings for multi-monitor setup does not help, and the document possibly was saved while working on a much larger screen (or a second screen), the x,y position of the window as stored in the file may simply be beyond the size of your current monitor. In this case you could manually edit those values in the SVG file, before opening it in Inkscape: use a plain-text editor (e.g. TextWrangler) to open the SVG file (make a backup copy first!), and look for lines similar to these ones:

     inkscape:window-x="175"
     inkscape:window-y="104"

Change both values to '0' (Zero), save the file and try again to open it in Inkscape.

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Adam (adamlhinz) said : 		#3

You're right! It showed up again. Had to change the pref for Mission Control to deselect separate spaces. Also had to do the workaround and reset the coordinate values.

I was on a dual monitor. Not sure why I didn't think about that.

Thanks!

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Adam (adamlhinz) said : 		#4

Thanks ~suv, that solved my question.