inkscape-open-symbols: icon sets packaged as Inkscape symbol libraries

Inkscape looks for SVG documents that contain symbol elements

The technical background is one sentence long, and everything else in the repository follows from it. A symbol library is a set of SVG symbols located in one SVG document, and for the technical audience the README says Inkscape searches for any valid SVG file with symbol elements in your system configuration directory, typically share/inkscape.

That is why a collection like this exists at all. A modern icon set is usually distributed as a webfont plus a handful of SVG files, which is a format the vector editor does not understand. To make an icon set usable in Inkscape, each drawing has to be wrapped in a symbol element, grouped into a document, and named so the symbol panel can list it.

The scale of the gap the project fills is described with a number: Inkscape 0.91 ships five example libraries, Logic Symbols, the AIGA and DOT transportation symbols, Map Symbols, Flow Chart Shapes and Word Balloons. Five is a thin catalogue for anyone making a diagram, and the README says the point of this collection is to add a great deal more.

The sets are shipped as ready-made SVG documents, one directory per set, so installing one means copying a directory into the place Inkscape looks.

Each icon set keeps the licence it came with

This is the section of the README that a careful reader should not skip, because the collection bundles other people's work.

The licence section groups the sets by their upstream licence rather than presenting one blanket statement. Google Material Design Icons are Apache 2.0. The Gnome Icon Theme Symbolic set is CC BY-SA 3.0. EmojiOne is CC BY 4.0. Entypo and the Nautic Alphabets are CC BY-SA 4.0. The list continues past the part of the document quoted here, and the repository ships a LICENSE.txt of its own, with the package manifest pointing at it with SEE LICENSE IN LICENSE.txt.

The distinction is not academic. A share-alike licence such as CC BY-SA attaches obligations to the derivative work, so a diagram built on the Gnome set or on Entypo is not automatically covered by the MIT licence of this collection. The collection's own licence covers the packaging work, the scripts and the documentation; the icons themselves keep the terms their authors chose.

Several sets also carry their own attribution requirements, and the README credits individual contributors for specific conversions, including Jacques Laroche for the Entypo social set and the Weatherize set, mivoligo for converting the Suru icons, and cleversomeday for the StateFace set.

Material Design ships in the normal style only

The Google Material Design pack is the biggest entry in the collection and the one whose state of completion is documented most precisely.

The README includes a table with one row per icon category and one column per style: normal, Outlined, Round, Sharp and Twotone. The normal column is filled in for most categories, Action, Alert, AV, Communication, Content, Device, Editor, File, Hardware, Image, Maps, Navigation, Notification, Places, Social and Toggle. Everything else in those rows is marked WIP, and a few categories are marked WIP even in the normal column, Home and Search.

The README defines what that means, and the definition is useful: WIP stands for work in progress, and the related files should not yet be packaged for distribution. So the table is not a roadmap, it is a warning about which files are safe to copy into a system directory.

A live preview of the icon set is available at the Google Material Design repository on GitHub, which is the fastest way to check whether a particular glyph exists in the version you would be importing.

A gulp pipeline and a generate script turn icon sets into symbol documents

The repository is not only a pile of finished files. There is a build pipeline, and the tree shows how it is organised.

Each icon set has its own directory at the root, with names that map to the upstream projects: Bootstrap, CircuiTikZ, dashicons, emoji-one, entypo, font-awesome, fork-awesome, genericons, gnome, humble-ui, iconic, ionicons, material-design, nautic-alphabets, octicons, stateFace, suru-icons, taiga and weathericons. The naming is not consistent in case, which is a small hint that the directories were added over years rather than generated in one go.

The tooling is gulp based. The package manifest lists gulp 5 with gulp-svg-symbols, gulp-cheerio, gulp-rename and gulp-util as development dependencies, and points its main entry at the gulpfile.js rather than at a library, because the project is a build tool as much as it is an asset collection. There is also a generate.py and a template.svg, which together suggest that the per-set packing is scripted rather than done by hand.

The manifest identifies the author as Xaviju and its repository field still points at github.com/Xaviju/inkscape-open-symbols, and the test script is a stub that echoes an error and exits with status 1. That is a collection that has been maintained by people rather than by a release pipeline.

Three numbered shell scripts keep Material Design in step

At the repository root there are three shell files with sequential names, 1-update-material-design.sh, 2-update-material-design.sh and 3-update-material-design.sh.

The numbering implies a pipeline with ordered stages, and the naming says what the subject is: updating the icon pack for Material Design. The obvious reason for a scripted update rather than a manual one is the state of that pack described earlier. Only the normal style is converted, and the remaining styles are marked as work in progress, so as upstream adds or changes icons someone has to redo the conversion. Doing that by hand across the whole set would be tedious and error prone, and a script makes the conversion repeatable.

The scripts also show where the project places its own workflows, which is the repository root rather than a tooling directory. There is no build directory and no scripts directory; the batch of commands sits next to the README, with the asset directories beside them.

For a user, the practical consequence is that the three scripts are the files to look at if you want to know how a symbol document is produced, or to adapt the process to an icon set that is not in the collection.

Several sets ship as families of smaller libraries

Some of the packs are not one library but a family of them, and the README lists the members.

Font Awesome is split into the Brands set, the Solid set and the Regular set, and the set is described as a full suite of 675 pictographic icons. The Gnome Icon Theme Symbolic is split further, into Action, Apps, Categories, Devices, Emblems, Emotes, Mimetypes, Places and Status. The Ubuntu Suru set, originally created for Ubuntu phones and tablets and converted into Inkscape symbols by mivoligo, is split into Actions, Apps, Devices, Mimetypes and Status.

The Nautic Alphabets pack is the most unusual. It contains three decorative sets of nautical alphabets from A to Z: Maritime Signal Flags with 37 symbols covering the letters, a space and numbers in fixed colour, Flag Semaphore Color with 30 symbols covering the letters and some punctuation, and a Flag Semaphore Outline variant whose colours can be changed.

Others arrive as a single library. Open Iconic is described as an open source set with 223 marks in SVG, webfont and raster formats. Entypo is 411 carefully crafted pictograms. StateFace covers all 50 US states plus the District of Columbia and a continental United States map.

Two of the entries were made for this collection rather than imported. Humble UI is a simple set of user interface elements for wireframes, created by Xaviju, who also started the project, and Weatherize is a set of weather related symbols by Jacques Laroche.

The tags stopped in 2018 and the tree is still being touched

The release history explains the character of the project.

Version 1.1 was published on 2017-01-13, version 1.2 on 2018-01-07 and version 1.2.1 on 2018-02-26, with the release names carrying the names of the designers the sets are attributed to, Anni Albers for 1.2 and Bruno Adler for 1.1. So the tagged releases stopped eight years ago, while the last push to the repository was on 2026-08-21.

That gap is the honest state of the thing. The repository is maintained, but it is not maintained on a schedule that produces releases, and the version numbers in the documentation refer to a collection that was assembled for Inkscape 0.91 and the icon sets available at the time. That pack alone shows the age, with the Outlined, Round, Sharp and Twotone styles still marked as work in progress.

What is in the repository beyond the packs is small but careful. There is an AUTHORS.md, a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and a CONTRIBUTING.md, a LICENSE.txt, a .gitignore and a package-lock.json. For a collection of assets, the licensing and conduct files matter more than usual, and their presence suggests the project took the question of redistribution seriously even if the release cadence did not keep up.

Editorial conclusion

inkscape-open-symbols fits a designer or developer who wants a well known icon set available inside Inkscape without hand converting it, because the packs are already valid SVG documents with symbol elements and the README says where Inkscape looks for them. It is the wrong choice if you need an icon set that is still moving, since the conversion of Material Design is only complete in the normal style and the rest are marked as work in progress, and it is the wrong choice if you are redistributing the packs commercially without checking the upstream terms, because each set keeps its own licence and several of them are share-alike. Before you ship anything made with these packs, read the licence group that applies to the specific set in the licence section of the README, because the MIT licence of the collection does not override the licence of the icons inside it.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. PanderMusubi/inkscape-open-symbols on GitHub
4. README
5. Releases