Troubleshooting Hardcopy

If the hardcopy generator detects that an error has occurred in the generation process, temporary files are automatically preserved and the error message provides links to the various temporary log files.

If an error is more subtle, you may need to preserve temporary files manually. Set $WeBWorK::PG::ImageGenerator::PreserveTempFiles to 1 (in webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/Constants.pm). After that, you should see directories like work.xxxxxx accumulating under html/tmp/hardcopy/ in your course directory. These contain files that the hardcopy generator uses in generating each PDF:

• hardcopy.tex - Source file to be fed to pdfLaTeX.
• hardcopy.log - Log file written by pdfLaTeX.
• pdflatex.stdout - Messages written to STDOUT by pdfLaTeX.
• pdflatex.stderr - Messages written to STDERR by pdfLaTeX.

If pdflatex.out and pdflatex.err don't exist, this indicates that pdfLaTeX was never invoked. I'm not sure what would cause this.

If hardcopy.log doesn't exist, then pdfLaTeX was invoked, but probably never ran. Check for a properly installed pdflatex and make sure that the path to pdflatex in global.conf is correct.

Check hardcopy.log, pdflatex.out, and pdflatex.err for errors. These might indicate problems in the TeX code being sent to pdfLaTeX for processing. The errors might be in the PG file, or in one of the header/footer snippets which are included to separate problems, sets, and users. The path to each file included in hardcopy.tex is noted in a comment.