Latex equations in Inkscape for OS X El Capitan users

Inkscape is a powerful illustration editor which I like to use when writing papers. Adding LaTeX formatted text is not a basic functionality, but there is an extension called textext for that.

However, making it work on El Capitan is far from trivial. I hope the following can spare you some extra minutes...

So, do the following:

• Download Inkscape. I used Inkscape v0.91.
• Get and install Eggbot from here. Note: it will require that Inkscape is in the Applications folder!
• Then download textext and extract it somewhere.
• Edit textext.py and search for 'pdflatex'. When it is called, it should be called from the right place, so set up the absolute path for it. (For me, it was '/Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex'.) As XQuartz has its own path system, this seemed to be easiest way to do it.
• You might still need to install a couple of tools to make it work. With Homebrew it is faster:
• brew install pdf2svg
  • brew install pstoedit
  • brew install ghostscript
• Then you have to make it usre that Ghostscript is linked to the right place in the system, otherwise textext will not find it: brew link --overwrite ghostscript If it complains, make the related directories manually and add permissions.
• Finally, copy the textext.py and textext.inx files into inkscape, the path should be something like this (inside inkscapes directory): /Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/share/inkscape/extensions/
• Then a new item 'Tex Text' should appear in your Extensions menu.

Enjoy!