TeX Live and MacTeX ⇒ A bunch of newbie questions

[rickszyr]

Hi! I'm new to the community, so to begin with, nice to meet you all.

I have just started with web programming, linux and suxh, and i wanted to include latex in my site to use it in posts and comments and such.

I was successful to follow http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com in order to install mimetex in my server (shared hosting), however, i find it impossible to use mathtex.

the goal is to be able to draw circuits.

I have installed TeXLive, and all of its packages in my server, and now i need to know where the DVIPNG file is, in order to be able to convert the output.

Here come the questions:
1. Does DVIPNG get installed automatically with TeXLive?
1.1. If so, does anyone know what is the default folder?
1.2. If not, how can I install it?


I probably should ask this in a linux forum, but maybe someone here has encountered that problem already,

I tried installing the ImageMagick software, but i can't find the "convert" file specified in the tutorial shown above. Where should i look for it? maybe someone knows?

I know this may be very vague, and I realize that I might not be asking the right questions, the thing is I don't really know what questions to ask either. Perhaps someone here can guide me.

Thank you very much!

rickszyr

[php1ic]

Here come the questions:
1. Does DVIPNG get installed automatically with TeXLive?
1.1. If so, does anyone know what is the default folder?
1.2. If not, how can I install it?

Have you installed TeXLive from source (ie did you get it from http://www.tug.org/texlive/)?

I did and on my system dvipng seems to be installed by default at the following path:

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[php1ic@localhost ~]$ which dvipng 
~/TeXLive2010/bin/i386-linux/dvipng
[php1ic@localhost ~]$ 

Don't know were "convert" might be on your system. To find it, try using the command "which" as I did above for dvipng.

[rickszyr]

Hi! Thank you for your answer.

Yes I did install TeXLive from source.

Have you been able to use it online to post graphics and such?

[frabjous]

Out of curiousity, why did you install from source? Doesn't your Linux distribution have binary TeXlive packages in its repository? Just a leaning exercise?

Installing from the net installer, the binary for dvipng was placed in:

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/usr/local/texlive/2010/bin/x86_64-linux/

But matters could certainly be different if installed from source, and will definitely be different if you don't have root access.

If:

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which dvipng

doesn't tell you where it is, then probably the executable is not in your $PATH.

If you have root access, try:

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sudo updatedb
locate dvipng

or

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find / -name dvipng

which should turn up its location even if it's not in your $PATH.

If you don't have root access, and know it would be installed somewhere in your home folder, you can try:

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find ~ -name dvipng

instead.

[rickszyr]

Hi frabjous and thanks for your reply!

I found dvipng!

Now I have a problem that is the following, the dvipng says (something like this)

gs: cannot find libgd.so.8 or something like that... any ideas?

this happens when, for example, i try to use another package... say pst-circ, or circuitiks.

Thanks!

[frabjous]

LibGD is a open source library for image creation. Obviously, it's required by both Ghostscript and LaTeX for various graphics related things.

How did you install Ghostscript? From source as well?

What Linux distribution are you using? Surely, it would be better to use its package manager so you can easily resolve dependencies, unless you're one of the masochist few who really must install everything from scratch!

On my distribution (ArchLinux) libgd.so is part of the gd package. On Ubuntu (and I imagine other Debian-based distros), it seems to be in the libgd2-xpm-dev.

[rickszyr]

Hi! the kernel version i'm running is: 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5.centos.plus

So i'm guessing my linux distribution is CentOS?

it's hosted in a shared hosting service, that's why this is sort of special.

Do I need to install ghostscript to make all of this work? If I can avoid it better!

the error it was throwing is the following:

<literal PSdvipng warning: PostScript environment contains DVI commands dvipng warning: PostScript environment contains DVI commands dvipng warning: PostScript environment contains DVI commands dvipng warning: PostScript environment contains DVI commands gs: error while loading shared libraries: libgs.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Is this because i need to install libgd? what is the difference between this and libgs?

Thank you!

RickSzyr

[frabjous]

Trying to do much of anything robustly with LaTeX without having ghostscript installed is not promising; LaTeX and ghostscript really go hand in hand. The usual way of converting LaTeX generated DVI files to PDF files involves dvips and ps2pdf. ps2pdf is merely a wrapper for a ghostscript call, and I think both dvips and dvipdf require ghostscript for at least some of their features, perhaps many of them.

gs is ghostscript -- it looks like ghostscript is already installed (--it may be installed system wide--), but to work right with LaTeX, it needs access to libgd as well. "which gs" should tell you where ghostscript is installed.

Is the issue that you don't have root access to the server, so you cannot use its package manager in the normal way? That does make things very tricky. I'm afraid I have no experience with trying to make this work, and I'm not really sure what your options are.

[rickszyr]

hi! question... apparently there is a "gs" in usr/bin. however, i cannot find that shared library it's talking about, libgs.so ... where do you think i can find that file? what program does it belong to?

because i can't find any libgs in the ghostscript tar file that i downloaded so maybe that's not what i need to download!

ANYWAYS, apparently i just need to get a dedicated server or a vps, so i can get root access and install whatever i want, however that's over my budget so I think i'll have to stick to mimetex for now. UNLESS, there is a way to include latex packages to mimetex. Anyone knows anything about that?

[frabjous]

libgs.so is part of ghostscript. On my machine it's found at /usr/lib/libgs.so -- but it may be elsewhere for you. Unless it's in a folder your administrator is hiding, you should be able to find it (if it exists) with

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find / -name libgs.so 2>/dev/null

(The "2>/dev/null" part can be omitted, but is there to suppress warnings about trying to look in folders you don't have read access to.)

I don't know anything about mimetex, I'm afraid; maybe someone else will.