Ipe's main features are:

• Entry of text as LaTeX source code. This makes it easy to enter mathematical expressions, and to reuse the LaTeX-macros of the main document. In the display text is displayed as it will appear in the figure.
• Produces pure Postscript/PDF, including the text. Ipe converts the LaTeX-source to PDF or Postscript when the file is saved.
• It is easy to align objects with respect to each other (for instance, to place a point on the intersection of two lines, or to draw a circle through three given points) using various snapping modes.
• Users can provide Ipelets (Ipe plug-ins) to add functionality to Ipe. This way, Ipe can be extended for each task at hand.
• The text model is based on Unicode, and has been tested with Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.
• The UI is implemented using the portable toolkit Qt, and so can be compiled for Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X (see below).
• Ipe is written in standard C++ using the STL.