Please excuse if this sounds silly. I just downloaded Inkscape and when I try to open the program I get this message: "While Inkscape is open, its windows can be displayed or hidden by displaying or hiding the X11 application. The first time this version of Inkscape is run it may take several minutes before the main window is displayed while font caches are built."

I click OK and wait and wait and wait and it doesn't open. I'm using an iMac running OS 10.5.6. I don't have a clue what the X11 application is?? Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks.

You might try searching the forums. There are severl topics about using Inkscape on a Mac. Even if your question isn't answered, you'll learn alot anyway about using Inkscape on a Mac.

Thanks for the reply, but it won't do any good to get tips on how to use Inkscape on a Mac if I can't get the program open. It downloaded fine, it just won't open. Thanks anyway.

(tips on how to use inkscape on a mac include installation issues - otherwise there aren't that many differences between the Windows/Linux/OS X once inkscape is running)

Which version exactly did you download?
Did you read the Inkscape wiki page about 'Installing on a Mac'?

first steps to figure out why inkscape doesn't start:

1. quit X11 and Inkscape
2. open Console.app (in Utilities), look for console.log in it and display it (logs button in the toolbar)
3. clear the log (brush button in the toolbar)
4. Open Inkscape and look for messages in console.log
5. copy paste the messages in here.

hth, ~suv

I think I just could reproduce your issue: I have Inkscape 0.47pre1 running on OS X 10.5.7 with XQuartz 2.3.3.2 without any launch problems. Yesterday while trying to figure out a similar issue I renamed (instead of emptied) the '~/.fontconfig' directory (contains the font caches). Subsequently I had the same launch problem as you described. So, here are two ways you could try to solve it:

1) use Terminal.app and type this command:
and launch Inkscape again. Be patient while the font caches are build from scratch.

2) works but I don't know yet why
While the window 'Inkscape on Mc OS X' with 'While Inkscape is open, its windows...' is displayed, don't close it, instead click (once) on the currently visible (bouncing) Inkscape icon in the dock. When testing, this starts X11 on its own (opening the default xterm and apparently creating the ~/.fontconfig dir) and now, you can continue Inkscape by ok'ing the information dialog and wait until the font caches are built.

Does this work for you?