Hard to understand why LaTeX extension is missing

[Kale Kundert]

It took me a few months to figure out why the Latex extension wasn't appearing in the Extensions > Render menu for me. It turned out that the problem was that I'd moved to a new computer and neglected to install ``pstoedit``, which the extension depends on.

This would've been much easier to diagnose and fix if the menu item had still been there and given some indication as to what the problem was. I thought of two reasonable and unobtrusive ways to do this:

1. Leave the "Latex..." item in the menu, but have it greyed-out and give it a tooltip explaining the problem if ``pstoedit`` or any other dependency is missing.

2. Leave the "Latex..." item in the menu and don't bother checking for its dependencies in advance. Just print an error in a dialog box if the extension fails because dependencies are missing.

There may be other ways to make missing dependencies more clear to the end-user too. I just found it frustrating that the menu item for the Latex plugin disappeared completely, because that made it very hard to understand what the problem was. (I thought for a long time that the menu had just moved, but I couldn't find where to.)

Inkscape version: 0.91
Steps to reproduce: Make sure that ``pstoedit`` is not installed, then observe that "Latex..." is not present in the Extensions > Render menu.

I've never done any development for inkscape before, but if someone can point me in the right direction I'd be happy to try to address this myself.

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

you can get a certain amount of information about which extensions are missing by inspecting the file extension-errors.log. This is located at:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\inkscape\extension-errors.log

In my case I get an entry that says:
Extension "LaTeX" failed to load because a dependency was not met.
Dependency:
  type: executable
  location: path
  string: pstoedit

admittedly this is not very user-friendly, but it can give an idea of what is potentially available.

[Homero Barrocas Soares Esmeraldo (homerobse)]

If you installed it with snap, this might help https://github.com/evil-mad/axidraw/issues/57