My previous post described how to include an Inkscape drawing in a LaTeX document. This post describes how to use LaTeX in an Inkscape drawing, which is probably more useful. The LaTeX output is included not as bitmap but as a vector drawing that can then be manipulated with all the features of Inkscape.
The Inkscape book describes the InkLaTeX extension, but the web site for InkLaTeX recommends a newer extension textext. Once textext is installed, you can insert LaTeX into an Inkscape drawing by going to the Extensions menu and selecting “TeX Text”. This launches a window in which to type your LaTeX source.
Before I could install textext, I had to install pstoedit. The textext extension also requires LaTeX and Ghostscript, but these were already on my computer. pstoedit has several installation options; I chose the default basic option and that worked. Also, pstoedit says that it requires two Visual C++ runtime DLLs: msvcr70.dll and msvcp70.dll. I already had these, but the pstoedit site gives a link to where you can find these DLLs if you need them.
I had Inkscape running when installed textext and I had to restart Inkscape to see the “TeX Text” menu.
Related post:
Including an Inkscape drawing in LaTeX
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Chucky Ellison 12.30.10 at 01:50
The link to textext seems to be broken. http://pav.iki.fi/software/textext/ seems to work (first hit on Google).
Mario Marín 02.04.11 at 18:12
There is no need to add extensions to inkscape to do this, now there is official support for latex in inscape. Follow these instructions:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/svg-inkscape/