Thank you, Uwe, for the helpful response. Also, thank you for authoring this package - it is quite beautiful.

Nevertheless, installing it could be easier. Please allow me to make some suggestions. The OP and I (and probably countless others) had the same problems, and it would be great if future users could avoid them. I would venture to say that most people (alas, myself included) do not read the INSTALL file until absolutely necessary. This may be bad practice, but I think it's an unfortunate reality. Why not read it? Well, usually it's not necessary. The usual steps when someone hands me a Qt project are: 1) Open it in Qt Creator. 2) Hit F5 (Build). If you do this with Qwt, however, you get the very misleading error the OP originally cited: "Qwt is configured without SVG support." Looking at the "Compile Output" tab, you see various errors listing missing files. This is what led me down the gloomy road of changing various paths, trying to get the code to compile.
Of course you can build Qwt with the Creator...in the end it does nothing else than qmake + make
So how do you do it? Can this be made the default? After all, Qt Creator is a development environment, and while there is nothing wrong with the command line, the beauty of having an IDE is that you don't have to leave it, and others have done a lot of work to make your life easier (e.g. F5 to build). In any case, it would certainly be nice if you could provide an error message that moves me in the right direction, e.g. "Don't compile Qwt here, do it from the command line".

Thanks again for the great package and the help!