** Using WeBWorK **

We would like to hear from people running WeBWorK 1.8 under Solaris. We are interested in how dvipng (i.e. typeset2 mode) was setup and how it is working. Jason Farmer at Radford reports problems with slow response times using dvipng. This is a problem that seemed to be corrected and then reappeared. See the discussion at http://webhost.math.rochester.edu/webworkdocs/discuss/msgReader$1398. Also Gavin LaRose at Michigan reports trouble compiling dvipng under Solaris. I believe that dvipng requires gnu make so that might account for Gavin's trouble.

If someone has dvipng working well under Solaris, we would appreciate their posting explicit instructions as to how they accomplished this.

Arnie

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I've now worked through compiling dvipng for Solaris 8, with only marginal success. I had to tweak a few things to get it to compile cleanly, and even with a clean compile it's not creating correctly formatted png equation files. Examples of the output I'm getting:

and

If anyone has insight as to what's going on here, I'd appreciate it.

For the benefit of anyone who is interested in the nitty-gritty,the changes I had to make to get this to compile were: in dvipng/Makefile:

1. CPPFLAGS : I changed this to reflect the paths to our non-system include files. I also took out -DDEBUG (c.f. below).
   
2. LDFLAGS: I changed the paths in this similarly.
   

I can't easily put code into our TeX directory, so I put it in another place and set the TEXINPUTS environmental variable. I'm not sure if this actually works, though I don't think it should affect the compilation of dvipng. In addition, I'm compiling in 64 bit mode and had to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to get the right libraries.

Finally, to get rid of two compile warnings,

font.c: In function `FontDef':
font.c:150: warning: int format, different type arg (arg 2)
pagelist.c: In function `SkipPage':
pagelist.c:31: warning: deprecated use of label at end of compound statement

I added the line " ;" at line 31 in pagelist.c and changed line 125 of font.c,

  if (Debug)
    printf("DEF FONT%ld: %s\n",k,n);

#ifdef DEBUG
  if (Debug)
    printf("DEF FONT%ld: %s\n",k,n);
#endif

With these changes I get a clean compile with no warnings or errors, but the output indicated above.

Thoughts, comments or suggestions are welcomed.
Gavin

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Ok, one more follow-up. I grabbed dvipng-0.2.tar.gz from sourceforge, and that seems to compile cleanly without changes--and produce correctly formatted images for me. Huzzah!

If anyone else is out there on (64bit) Solaris 8 or better, I'm happy to provide the binary.

Thanks,
Gavin

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