[tex-live] dvipng woes

[Zdenek Wagner]

2007/10/10, Paul Mantz <pcmantz at gmail.com>:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am doing some .png rendering of LaTeX documents for web display
> with MacTeX on OS X 10.4.10 using the following toolchain:
>
> .tex to .dvi (latex)
> .dvi to .png (dvipng)
> .png to .png (ImageMagick convert, just doing general polish)
>
> I should also note that I am doing this from within Apache, and using
> a custom-created type1 Trebuchet MS font from a .ttf file, a bunch of
> custom classes, and non-standard packages.  They were originally
> stored in my ~/Library/texmf directory, but I moved them to
> /usr/local//texlive/texmf-local, which I later found out is a result
> of Apache not providing a $HOME variable in the environment, which
> messes up kpathsea's path expansion.
>
It is not exactly an answer to your question but remember that Apache
does not pass any environment variable to the CGI scripts. If you need
them, you have to put PassEnv into your httpd.conf, or set the
variables by SetEnv.

> Anyways, that solved problems I had with LaTeX, but I noticed I was
> still having problems with dvipng.  The issue is that my fonts are not
> being detected by dvipng.  When I open up my .dvi files with xdvik
> (using X11), I find that this stage of rendering is working correctly.
>  Also, when I run dvipng  from the command line, dvipng is able to
> find my font in my home directory, and uses that.
>
> After some searching and looking at debug output of dvipng, I found
> the following snippet in the documentation of dvipng:
>
> %%%%%
> 2.4 Installation outside the texmf tree
>
> In some cases, a dvipng binary installed outside the texmf tree will
> not be able to find virtual fonts, or the PostScript font maps
> (normally used by dvips). This may be because only $SELFAUTOLOC,
> $SELFAUTODIR, and $SELFAUTOPARENT are used in the texmf tree
> configuration file `texmf.cnf'. If so, give the switch
> `--enable-selfauto-set' to `./configure'. This will make dvipng adjust
> these three internally so that kpathsea thinks that dvipng is
> installed in the texmf tree.
> %%%%%
>
> This pretty accurately describes my problem to the letter, but I don't
> know anything about the compile-time options sent when the MacTeX
> package was created.  I emailed Richard koch, and said that the MacTex
> binaries are created from texlive, then packaged up for easy
> distribution.  So my question is, does anyone know if this flag is
> used at compile-time by default, and if not, what would be the best
> way to go about replacing my current binary with a correctly
> configured one?  What options would I need to pass it for it to work
> correctly in OS X?  will I have to risk rebuilding any toolchains?
>
> Thanks,
> Paul Mantz
>


-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz