Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 00:25

This tutorial will help you add mail merge features to Inkscape by using NextGenerator extension. Its purpose is to automatically generate items like cards intended for different recipients with different photos, colors and more. Licensed under GNU GPL just like Inkscape, it is historically a successor to an extension named InkGenerator. Now let's do it.


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Notes

The old extension named InkGenerator is still available officially on Ubuntu repository by package name ink-generator. However, NextGenerator has not been available as a package so we need to install it manually until Ubuntu made it available.

 

Steps to install NextGenerator

 

1. Visit NextGenerator official web page.

We see it's now hosted at GitLab.

 

2. Download the source code from the web page. 

We click download button -> select ZIP -> download starts -> downloaded.  See picture above. 

 

3. Extract the ZIP file. 

We right-click the ZIP file -> Extract Here -> a folder created -> this folder name will read like this next_generator_2022.10.16.00.25.

 

4. Move NextGenerator folder into the folder of Inkscape extensions. 

If you want to install it for your own user, you can do this command line:

$ mv -v next_generator_xyz ~/.config/inkscape/extensions/

But if you want it for all users, you can do this instead:

$ sudo mv -v next_generator_xyz /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/

Where _xyz is the numbers part of the folder name. 

 

5. Restart Inkscape. 

 

6. Find the extension under menu Extensions -> Export -> NextGenerator. 

It is useful to note that the old extension, Ink Generator, was located differently under Misc -> Generator.

 

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.