I'm using inkscape version "Inkscape 0.48.3.1 r9886 (Jan 29 2013)", installed by the ubuntu package manager (ubuntu 12.04).

I'm looking to use one of the built-in extensions, LaTeX Formula, which, according to this wiki page, should work out of the box provided the dependencies are installed.

Now, in the ~/.config/inkscape/extension-errors.log, I notice the following relevant lines:



However, I have those three programs installed; they're on my path:


I have already reinstalled inkscape from the repository, deleted the preferences.xml file, but the error stays there (and yes, I am refreshing that log file too), but the extension never appears under the menu Extensions > Render.

Any idea how I can get inkscape to print its search path? I'd like to know why it isn't recognizing that those programs are installed, so maybe it's looking in other directories.

Ignoring the error log for the time being, what happened that caused you to look up the error log? (That darned error log causes more problems than it solves, in my experience!)

You said the extension isn't showing in the menu? We had another message like that a month or 2 ago. It seems the extension has been removed from Inkscape. I don't know why. The other person solved it by installing the extension "manually". There are 2 extensions dealing with LaTex.

http://www.kono.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/~arak ... latex.html
http://www.iki.fi/pav/software/textext/

FYI, the current stable version of Inkscape is 0.91 https://inkscape.org/en/download/

The reason I looked up the error log was indeed that the extension wasn't being shown in the menus, which it should have according to the linked wiki.

I *assume* that the other person meant by "installing the extension manually" that he/she indeed installed a 3rd party plugin. I took that route as well (installed textext), but found numerous problems related to the fact that it was designed for python2, not python3, which is my default python version. I attempted to correct the minor changes I knew would make it work in python3 until the script (textext) no longer gave SyntaxErrors. Doesn't mean I got it to work though: as a last workaround, I temporarily changed my default python interpreter to python2 and then found textext working.

I'm thinking about contributing to some of the extensions, by making them python3-ready. I don't know what inkscape's current position is on that either (haven't looked it up yet). I'm a tad busy at the moment though, so I can't make any promises.

Thank you for informing me the plugin is apparently not in recent builds. That's unfortunate though: for academic posters, maths are often used.

Hello,

If you look at the INX file of that extension,you will recognize the path to the dependencies. Maybe there is the mistake, or the dependencies path changed.

I understand that you have LaTeX distribution (TexLive?), installed on your machine. Maybe there is something I'm missing but It's better to install the distribution package than parts of that (pstoedit,Latex, dvi, etc).

If you solve your problem (or a workaround) let us know

I *assume* that the other person meant by "installing the extension manually" that he/she indeed installed a 3rd party plugin.

It's been my impression that those "3rd party" extensions were the ones that were packed in Inkscape in previous versions. I could be wrong about that though.

One last suggestion for getting the LaTex capability, would be to install the last stable version, which is 0.48.5 (or whatever is the last one where it worked). You would not have to uninstall 0.91. Just install the other version in a different directory.

I would suggest contacting developers about making extensions python3-ready. Can do either via mailing list (devel or user) https://inkscape.org/en/download/ or via IRC channel https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/.

I suspect that any work you can contribute to the project will be warmly and happily welcomed.....Unless there is some technical issue with python3, which I'm not aware of (because I'm generally not very technically aware, and not because I have some particular idea that there might be some issue).

I haven't looked at the Roadmap lately, but it seems to change every time I look at it. Maybe something there though??? http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap

I'm not sure if it's the one you're all talking about, but a Latex formula extension *is* included with Inkscape 0.91 (see http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.d ... 1m6ly-7613)

It requires the following executables to be installed:
latex (for Ubuntu in texlive package)
dvips (for Ubuntu the package is dvipsk-ja)
pstoedit (for Ubuntu the package is pstoedit)

After installing these, I do have the extension available in Inkscape 0.91 (on Linux Mint 17.2, based on Ubuntu 14.04), in the Render submenu.
My paths are the same as yours, owilleke, (dvips has a different name, though, but they should just be links: /usr/bin/dvips.nonja /usr/bin/dvips /usr/bin/X11/dvips.nonja /usr/bin/X11/dvips /usr/share/man/man1/dvips.1.gz).

Unfortunately, this won't help you with why it doesn't work, only tells you that it's possible on a more recent Ubuntu version...

How about installing a newer Inkscape, as a first try? There's a ppa here: https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/+ar ... ntu/stable
You can always uninstall and reinstall the old version from your official repos. Make sure you keep a copy of your old 0.48.3 preferences file around, if you don't want to loose the prefs in case you don't want to work with 0.91 and go back to 0.48.3 (I'm not sure if they are 100% backwards compatible - this is just a safety measure). New Inkscape version comes with new bugs - but also a lot of fixes, improvements and features. See http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... notes/0.91 (and the previous release notes - 0.48.3 is really very, very, very old...).

For texlive, there's also a ppa floating around somewhere, so you can get access to an improved version (https://launchpad.net/~texlive-backports).

Wow, nice community: lots of hints here in the past few messages.
Please forgive my elaborate writing in this post: I do this merely to help other users in the future who tend to search for solutions, to make this story absolutely not vague.

hulf2012 wrote:If you look at the INX file of that extension,you will recognize the path to the dependencies. Maybe there is the mistake, or the dependencies path changed.

As expected, the inx file of both textext as well as the builtin plugin refer simply to programs that are either in the extensions directory or on the path. Example for the eqtexsvg builtin:

And I assume that location="path" implies that the $PATH variable will be searched (both on Linux as well as Windows with its path). So it's still unclear why inkscape 0.48.3.1 says those dependencies are not present, when they are.
That being said, on an another machine (Linux Mint Debian Edition (3.11-2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.11.8-1 (2013-11-13) x86_64 GNU/Linux)) which has a slightly higher version of inkscape ("Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939 (Aug 16 2013)", from the default repositories), the built-in extension does work, provided I change my default interpreter to python2, even though it generates an information message easily interpreted for an error message:

Inkscape has received additional data from the script executed. The script did not return an error, but this may indicate the results will not be as expected.

Summary: it works fine on that machine.

hulf2012 wrote:I understand that you have LaTeX distribution (TexLive?), installed on your machine. Maybe there is something I'm missing but It's better to install the distribution package than parts of that (pstoedit,Latex, dvi, etc).

Correct, I have texlive installed from the default repositories, which of course took care of the dependencies for me. So there's no issue there.

hulf2012 wrote:If you solve your problem (or a workaround) let us know

My workaround was to install textext on the first machine and ensure that python2.x was the default interpreter (the current version of textext uses several python2.x constructs that will generate SyntaxErrors in python3). However, for that Ubuntu machine, there's an easier solution if one really wants to go with the built-in plugin, as mentioned by Moini in his post here:

Moini wrote:How about installing a newer Inkscape, as a first try? There's a ppa here: https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/+ar ... ntu/stable

That seems like a good idea on my Ubuntu machine. Won't try it on my LMDE though, since it wasn't made for that and problems can be expected in that case. When this problem popped up in the past week, I hadn't found out about this PPA yet.

... a few minutes later...

Checked! Using that PPA, I now have Inkscape 0.91 r (Jan 30 2015), on which the default plugin works just fine (note that no extra packages were installed, so the dependencies listed in my first post were still where they were normally, i.e. on the path. Problem solved.

brynn wrote:One last suggestion for getting the LaTex capability, would be to install the last stable version, which is 0.48.5 (or whatever is the last one where it worked). You would not have to uninstall 0.91. Just install the other version in a different directory.

Well, as mentioned above, a slightly later version works fine, but it's an install on a different machine (LMDE vs Ubuntu 12.04). All I can say is that the "eqtexsvg.inx" file is identical on both machines, so it's kind of peculiar that one install generates path-related errors in the "extension-errors.log" as both distros have the required packages on their path. Perhaps it's a bug that got ironed out when transitioning from 0.48.3.1 to 0.48.4 r9939. Of course, your suggestion and that of Moini are the best: simply get the latest available package, and after 10 or so years on Linux, I should have known that too. It just didn't occur to me.

brynn wrote:I would suggest contacting developers about making extensions python3-ready. Can do either via mailing list (devel or user) https://inkscape.org/en/download/ or via IRC channel https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/.

I suspect that any work you can contribute to the project will be warmly and happily welcomed.....Unless there is some technical issue with python3, which I'm not aware of (because I'm generally not very technically aware, and not because I have some particular idea that there might be some issue).

Good suggestions, thanks for the pointer. I'll follow up on it, would be happy to contribute a bit to the open-source community.

brynn wrote:I haven't looked at the Roadmap lately, but it seems to change every time I look at it. Maybe something there though??? http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap

Thank you for the link. I'm not familiar yet with the wealth of information for inkscape online, so it would have taken me some time to find it. Much appreciated.