|  |  | 8.6 Environment variables

## 8.6 Environment variables

Ipe, ipetoipe, iperender, and ipescript respect the following environment variables:

IPELATEXDIR
  the directory where Ipe runs Latex.
IPELATEXPATH
  the directory that contains the pdflatex, xelatex, and lualatex commands. If not set, Ipe assumes the commands are on your path.
IPEDEBUG
  set to 1 for debugging output.
IPEANCIENTPDFTEX
  set this variable to use Pdftex versions older than 1.40.
IPETEXFORMAT
  if set, Ipe will not call pdflatex but pdftex requesting the pdflatex format (and similarly for xetex and luatex). This is needed to use cygwin's latex.

The Ipe program uses several additional environment variables:

EDITOR
  external editor to use for editing text objects.
IPESTYLES
  a list of directories, separated by semicolons on Windows and colons otherwise, where Ipe looks for stylesheets, for instance for the standard stylesheet basic.isy. You can write _ (a single underscore) for the system-wide stylesheet directory. If this variable is not set, the default consists of the system-wide stylesheet directory, plus ~/.ipe/styles on Unix, plus ~/Library/Ipe/Styles on OS X.
IPELETPATH
  a list of directories, separated by semicolons on Windows and colons otherwise, containing ipelets. You can write _ (a single underscore) for the system-wide ipelet directory. If this variable is not set, the default consists of the system-wide ipelet directory, plus ~/.ipe/ipelets on Unix, plus ~/Library/Ipe/Ipelets on OS X.
IPEICONDIR
  directory containing icons for the Ipe user interface.
IPEDOCDIR
  directory containing Ipe documentation.
IPELUAPATH
  path for searching for Ipe Lua code.

The ipescript program uses the following environment variable:

IPESCRIPTS
  a list of directories, separated by semicolons on Windows and colons otherwise, where ipescript looks for scripts. You can write _ (a single underscore) for the system-wide script directory. If this variable is not set, the default consists of the current directory and the system-wide script directory, plus ~/.ipe/scripts on Unix, plus ~/Library/Ipe/Scripts on OS X.

#### ipe.conf

Ipe allows you to set environment variables by writing the definitions in a file ipe.conf. On Windows, the file has to be in the top level of the Ipe directory (the same place that contains the readme.txt and gpl.txt files), on Linux and OSX it is simply .ipe/ipe.conf in your home directory. Each line of the file contains a setting for one environment variable, for instance like this:

    IPEDEBUG=1
    IPELATEXDIR=C:\latexrun