Re: [Matplotlib-users] can't import pylab

[Jouni K. S. <jk...@ik...>]

John Seales <pra...@ho...> writes:

> it's a problem with ft2font. I checked for the existence of the files
> it's looking for, the libfreetype.6.dylib, and ft2font.so – they exist
> in the places they're supposed to. I don't really know what 'image not
> found' exactly means.

> ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib/ft2font.so, 2): Library not loaded: /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib
>   Referenced from: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib/ft2font.so
>   Reason: image not found

What version of OS X are you using? How did you install Python and
Matplotlib - did you get a precompiled version, or install via Fink or
MacPorts, or compile it yourself?

Here's a wild guess: since /usr/X11R6 is just a symlink to /usr/X11, the
file /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib has an "install name" of
/usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib, and perhaps the dynamic linker doesn't
like the mismatch. Do the following commands fix the problem?

cd /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib
cp ft2font.so ft2font.so.bak
install_name_tool -change /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib \
 /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib ft2font.so

If not, copy ft2font.so.bak back over the modified ft2font.so to prevent
the attempted fix from breaking anything else.

-- 
Jouni K. Seppänen
http://www.iki.fi/jks