Inkscape & Mac Errors with textext

On my OS X system, by default, the textext give the error "cannot find pdflatex".

The original version of textext is no longer maintained. One way to fix is to edit the plugin’s source.
Don’t worry, it is an easy fix.

First, find out where you pdflatex is by running the shell command:

$ which pdflatex

In my system it is /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex. You will need the path in a few steps.

Next, update open the plugin’s python file. Use your favorite text editor, mine is vim.

vim /Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/share/inkscape/extensions/textext.py

Go to line 727 change the line:

exec_command(['pdflatex', self.tmp('tex')] + latexOpts)

To be the full path to pdflatex. So, I updated mine to.

exec_command(['/Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex', self.tmp('tex')] + latexOpts)

Next time you run the plugin, it should work.

Another alternative is to try a fork of textext. While I have not tried any of them, pitgarbe's fork looks to be the one with the most active development.