1. Run the latest bleeding edge Inkscape from https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/+archive/trunk
2. Install the Hershey Text plugin by unpacking to ~/.config/inkscape/extensions/
3. Click on Extensions>Render>Hershey Text

Popup reports "Inkscape has encountered an internal error and will close now". Program disappears, and console reports... "Segmentation fault (core dumped)"

Note, this works even from a blank document, so seems a fairly clean and reproducable error.

This is no issue unless it reflects a long-term change in Inkscape which renders Hershey Text permanently broken. If it's a temporary glitch in Inkscape trunk then obviously nothing needs to be done. However, the trunk build is otherwise stable and usable from recent experiments.

I'm running on Lubuntu 13.04 Beta 2

The current development version of Inkscape has a significant number of crash issues, including reported crashes when trying to do such outlandish things as print, use the "live preview" feature in extensions, or open the Inkscape Preferences dialog. Generally, these things are fixed for stable releases.

Please re-open this issue: - If the issue persists in a released version of Inkscape, - A change that can be made to Hershey Text that will fix the crash issue (but not break it on released versions of Inkscape) - If you can identify other extensions-- ones officially supported by Inkscape --that crash in the same way. We could help file and/or corroborate a bug report. As Hershey Text is not officially supported by the Inkscape team, reporting a bug on it to them will not help to fix the underlying issue.

Hi, again.

Rolled back to a released Inkscape (pretty sure) which reports itself as... cefn@cefn-raring-dell:~$ inkscape --version Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939 (Feb 27 2013) ...in other words within Lubuntu's Synaptic package manager, I deselected inkscape-trunk and reselected inkscape to try and get back to stable.

I also removed my .config/inkscape folder so there wasn't cruft from the newer version.

I now have exactly the same issue as originally reported, running the Hershey Text plugins within .config/inkscape/extensions from the 1.00 zip.

Is there something I can do to gather meaningful data from the crash?

We have been testing against Ubuntu, and the current Inkscape version that is supported on Ubuntu is 0.48.3. I cannot reproduce the problem in 0.48.3 in Ubuntu.

The latest version of Inkscape supported on the Mac is 0.48.2, where Hershey Text also works properly.

Inkscape 0.48.4 is supported on Windows, and the Hershey Text extension also works there.

Thanks for all the bug bisection. I hope to get somewhere with this as laser-cutting text is really important use of Inkscape for me.

Yeah, I'm basing my desktop on a pre-release image, but which will be the released version in two days, so 0.48.4 is coming through as the supported Ubuntu version I think.

Do you know is there any other residual material I might need to remove to roll back fully to 0.48.4. I've tried a purge and reinstall, with removal of the .config/inkscape directory, but perhaps there's something else.

Is there some weird way that the build could actually rely on Unity or some other undeclared dependency which happens to come with a full Ubuntu desktop!!?! I'm running Lubuntu - the minimal desktop based on LXDE

I'll have to have a go at a rollback to the quantal version of Inkscape from raring if nothing else works.

Once it's easy for me to test on a copy of Ubuntu here, I'll certainly take a look. I don't have a copy of lubuntu at present.

Have you been able to see any similar problems with any other extensions?

Nothing else has hit me, yet.

I have the same issue with 0.48.3.1 r9886 based on the quantal-updates repository - identical behaviour.

Should I somehow be running the plugin from a different source file? I downloaded the Hershey plugin in its separate zip before unzipping to .config/inkscape/extensions/

The folder structure looks like...

cefn@cefn-raring-dell:~/.config/inkscape/extensions$ ls -la total 424 drwxr-x--x 2 cefn cefn 4096 Apr 23 09:30 . drwxr-x--x 7 cefn cefn 4096 Apr 23 09:28 .. -rwxr-xr-x 1 cefn cefn 413976 Apr 23 09:30 hersheydata.py -rw-r--r-- 1 cefn cefn 3196 Apr 23 09:30 hershey.inx -rwxr-xr-x 1 cefn cefn 3519 Apr 23 09:30 hershey.py

If you've an idea how I can see the nature of the error I'm happy to spend more time on it.

I don't recognize any red flags with your setup, but I did not have any issues with 0.48.3 in my local tests.

See if Extensions > Color > Black and White causes any issues for you. Also, try Extensions > Render > Gear.

Both of those extensions are fine on 0.48.4 in my build. Gear produces a gear. If I select the gear fill it red and run Color > Black and White, it goes black as expected.

Well, that rules out a couple of possible specific bugs...

I'm having the same issue in Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939, the version offered in Ubuntu 13.04. The "Inkscape has encountered an internal error and will close now" appears, and the terminal output looks as follows:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::logic_error'
  what():  basic_string::_S_construct null not valid

Emergency save activated!
Emergency save completed. Inkscape will close now.
If you can reproduce this crash, please file a bug at www.inkscape.org
with a detailed description of the steps leading to the crash, so we can fix it.
Aborted (core dumped)

I actually just found a "fix". Remove the following element from hershey.inx:

<_param name="emptyspace" type="description" xml:space="preserve">
</_param>

Inkscape apparently doesn't like empty _param elements, even though it's valid XML.

Fixed in SVN.

Fixed in release 2.3.4.

It's still broken in the version distributed here:

http://code.google.com/p/eggbotcode/downloads/detail?name=HersheyText_1.00.zip&can=3&q=hershey

Is there a better repository that everyone should be looking at?

However, I can confirm that removing the offending empty element fixed the problem for me (Kubuntu v13.01 with Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939).

Please use release 2.3.4: https://code.google.com/p/eggbotcode/downloads/detail?name=eggbot_2013_08_11_2.3.4.zip