Math & Science ⇒ Chemfig doesn't work

[eXaM]

Hello everyone. First of all, sorry for my English. It's not my native language, but I guess there are many people like me so it is not a problem, I hope. I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 and LaTeX Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian). Thus, I have an issue with Chemfig. I have downloaded it from here, unzipped the archieve to /usr/local/share/texmf/ and typed "sudo texhash" in Terminal. Then, I tried to run LaTeX on a file copied from Chemfig documentation (it's code to display a water molecule), but the output is just H instead of something like "H — O — H" as it's shown in documentation. However, no error appeared. I've been googling for all the weekend and now I'm struck. What's the worst thing, I must make some protein formules next week. Hope I chose the right place for my topic and some help will arrive. Otherwise, the overpopulation problem will make a little step to its solution.
P.S. If there is any Chemfig user, it would be awesome if he could post an instruction for adding Chemfig to TeX Live.

[localghost]

Provide a minimal example and attach the corresponding log file to your next post by uploading it to the forum server.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[eXaM]

I think a minimal example is not needed as my .div file is pretty small. Here is it entirely:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{chemfig}
\begin{document}
\chemfig{H-O-H}
\end{document}

[localghost]

Either convert the DVI file to PS (and then to PDF) or compile directly with PDFLaTeX. The DVI file format is not good for viewing the resulting output.

[eXaM]

It worked! Amazing, thank you so much! But what changed? Why does PDFLaTeX work fine when just LaTeX has an issue?

[localghost]

As I already said, the DVI file format is an intermediate format and not for viewing the intended output. Most DVI viewers can't display the code specials used by packages like pgf/tikZ (the graphical back-end of chemfig) correctly.

[eXaM]

Okay, thanks for the answer. But I have one more question. It's the last one for sure. When I want to make a math formule, I use dvipng with "-bg transparent -T tight" and the output is just formule, with the background cropped. Is it possible to do something like that using ImageMagick? May -fuzz be helpful?

[localghost]

At which point of the process does ImageMagick come into play? Conversion of DVI to PNG? However, I think that this is primarily not a question for this forum.

[eXaM]

PDF to PNG. All I got after some tries is a picture with transparent background. I agree with you, this question is really not for this forum, but it's not important enough to create a separate topic, so I asked right in this one.

[localghost]

PDF to PNG. All I got after some tries is a picture with transparent background. […]

Appears to me as if this is a job for an image manipulation software like GIMP. It can import PDF and add an alpha channel to PNG for transparency.

[…] I agree with you, this question is really not for this forum, but it's not important enough to create a separate topic, so I asked right in this one.

Actually it's not a topic for LaTeX Community in general, not only for this sub-forum.