Installing textext extension of Inkscape in Ubuntu

Recent versions of Inkscape have functionality for creating math from LaTeX code, but its functionality is limited. If you want a more powerful system which creates an editable (and re-editable) latex object with support for loading custom packages and definitions, then you wantTeXtext. See the screenshot below.

Update:

As of the new Inkscape 0.48, the LaTeX extension seems to work very well. I didn’t see anything that let me put in place a custom preamble, but you can load packages. So for most tasks, the packaged LaTeX extension that comes with Inkscape 0.48 works very well!

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Installation is straightforward. You’ll need to have a TeX distribution installed. I usually have the full TeX Live metapackage from my distro. In the case of Ubuntu, it’s just

sudo apt-get install texlive-full

Now you can go through the business of installing TeXtext. Start by installing the dependencies, which are

• Pstoedit with its plot-svg back-end compiled in, or,
• Pstoedit and Skconvert, or,
• Pdf2svg (the one by David Barton & Matthew Flaschen, not the one by PDFtron) and
• lxml Python library

Again in Ubuntu, this can be done with




sudo apt-get install pstoedit pdf2svg python-lxml

I find that just having pstoedit doesn’t work, despite the fact that the plot-svg driver works fine. 

Now, download and extract the TeXtext files, and place them in~/.config/inkscape/extensions/.

To install under Windows, check out the instructions in the post

http://texnorte.blogspot.com/2013/06/instalar-la-extension-textext-en.html

in this blog or on TeXtext website.