Almost every Inkscape extension yields an error in Mac OS X

Question

I've run the latest few versions of Inkscape (currently landed on "0.47+devel"), and have been having trouble with the Extensions menu. So far, in every version of Inkscape I've tried, nearly every extension yields the following error:

The fantastic lxml wrapper for libxml2 is required by inkex.py and therefore this extension. Please download and install the latest version from http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/lxml/, or install it through your package manager by a command like: sudo apt-get install python-lxml

I've tried the instructions listed there, of course, with no effect. I've also found many references to this issue on fora, in bug trackers, etc., and as such also tried:

sudo easy_install lxml
cd /Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/lib
mv libxml2.2.dylib libxml2.2.dylib.old
ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.dylib

and a few similar solutions. Nothing has produced any change in Inkscape's behavior.

Does anyone know A) what's really going on here? Because from what I gather the error is not describing the actual problem. And of course B) a simple solution? I need those features! :)

Answer 1

I had this problem and managed to get rid of it by installing lxml externally (I presume that's what your easy_install lxml command is doing, although I used sudo port install py26-lxml instead).

Then I went into

/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/python/site-packages/i386

Under here, there are several directories, one for each Python version, and each contains a copy of lxml. I renamed these, restarted inkscape and the extensions started working.

Thus

sudo port install py26-lxml
cd /Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/python/site-packages/i386
mv 2.3/lxml 2.3/_lxml
mv 2.4/lxml 2.4/_lxml
mv 2.5/lxml 2.5/_lxml
mv 2.6/lxml 2.6/_lxml

Worked for me.

Answer 2

This one worked for me: http://caih.org/open-source-software/fixing-inkscape-in-mac-os-x/