TeX in matplotlib on Mac OS X and TeX Live

Question

I have the following Hello World code to try out TeX rendering with matplotlib on my Mac.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import rc

rc('text', usetex=True)
rc('font', family='serif')

plt.text(2,2,r"Hello World!")
plt.show()

With that code, I'd get the following error:

sh: latex: command not found
Exception in Tkinter callback
<... a long Traceback here ...>
RuntimeError: LaTeX was not able to process the following string:
'lp'
Here is the full report generated by LaTeX:

I don't see any kind of full report after the last line. Anyway, I think this is a path problem. Some pointers on how I could fix it? I have TeX Live 2010.

I tried adding /Library/TeX/Root/bin/universal-darwin to the Global Python Path of the Project Properties, but I still get the same errors.

Answer 1

In future you might want to mention that you're running the code from NetBeans. The Python path is not $PATH, instead it's sys.path, the path from which Python code is loaded. You need to set os.environ['PATH'] in your Python code; with TeX Live the preferred way to reference the current TeX installation is /usr/texbin.