Vpype

Vpype really is a versitile tool to generate, optimize, transform and exporting vector graphics. It is a command line tool written in Python, so you do need some technical knowledge to use it.

Caution

If you are not familiar with the command line or Python, you might want to skip this.

Installation

Although there is an installation guide for vpype, doing installs for a Python project can be a bit tricky. So we will go through the steps here and ajust them for our needs.

Homebrew

Install Homebrew, we will use this to install other tools.

Check which python version you currently have installed.

python3 --version

This should be 3.12. Vpype doesn’t work with python 3.13 at the time of writing. If you do have Python 3.12 installed, you could skip the pyenv install part, but it is recommended to use pyenv to manage your python versions anyhow.

Don’t worry if you have got an error, we will install python 3.12 with pyenv.

Python version manager

install pyenv with homebrew

brew install pyenv

Reboot your terminal, you can do this with the following command or simply close and re-open your terminal.

source ~/.zshrc

Install python 3.12 with pyenv

pyenv install 3.12

Don’t forget to set up your shell environment for pyenv. For zsh, this is done by running the following lines:

echo 'export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'command -v pyenv >/dev/null || export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.zshrc

Reboot/reload your terminal. Check if the installation went well by running the following command. This should return a version number starting with 3.12

pyenv versions

optionally: set the global python version to 3.12

pyenv global 3.12

Pipx

Pipx is a tool that allows you to install Python applications in isolated environments. This wil make the vpype command available in your terminal. We will install this via homebrew.

brew install pipx

pipx ensurepath

Vpype

Now we can install vpype with pipx, we will specify to use python 3.12 for this

pipx install --python python3.12 "vpype[all]"

Vpype should now be installed and ready to use. You may check that it is fully functional by having a look at its version or displaying some random lines:

vpype --version
vpype random show

Plugins

If you got vpype working, then you can install some plugins. In this tutorial, we will install the embroidery plugin.

pipx inject vpype vpype-embroidery

As stated in the documentation of the plugin, you can try this out by running the following command:

vpype begin grid -o 25 25 10 10 circle 0 0 100 end efill sho