How To Save Inkscape Optimized SVG's On FreeBSD

You’ve probably noticed the shiny custom logo in the top left of this site.

Well, I used Inkscape to design that.

But you can’t just save an Inkscape SVG file to your website and use it as a regular image or logo.

It has to be optimized for the web.

How to save an optimized SVG in Inkscape on FreeBSD (for logos and so on)

I’m not going to cover Inkscape basics here (I’ll assume you’ve already finished your design).

Go up to File > Save As…

Click on the file type select box and scroll all the way to the bottom of the list. You’ll see “Optimized SVG (*.svg)”.

However this won’t work out of the box.

On FreeBSD, you’ll need to do the following before running Inkscape:

doas pkg install py27-lxml py36-lxml (depends on your Python version but you can install both)

Follow this with:

doas pkg install py27-scour py36-scour

Also, make sure to do Path > Object to Path before saving so your logo doesn’t appear messed up.

After this, go to File > Document Properties… and click ‘Resize page to drawing or selection’.

That’s it.