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Arnold K. Pizer - dvipng and Solaris

Arnold K. Pizer - dvipng and Solaris

by Arnold Pizer -
Number of replies: 0
inactiveTopicdvipng and Solaris topic started 4/25/2003; 2:32:56 PM
last post 6/11/2003; 1:02:44 PM
userArnold K. Pizer - dvipng and Solaris  blueArrow
4/25/2003; 2:32:56 PM (reads: 1308, responses: 3)
Hi,

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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userGavin LaRose - Re: dvipng and Solaris  blueArrow
6/11/2003; 10:58:12 AM (reads: 1522, responses: 0)
Hi Arnie,

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:
testme2.png
and
testme3.png

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);
to
#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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userGavin LaRose - Re: dvipng and Solaris  blueArrow
6/11/2003; 11:25:57 AM (reads: 1522, responses: 0)
Hi Arnie,

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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userJohn Jones - Re: dvipng and Solaris  blueArrow
6/11/2003; 1:02:44 PM (reads: 1543, responses: 0)
Hi everyone,

I am glad that dvipng-0.2 worked well for you. I was going to point people to the official distribution when the next version came out. This one has a bug (present in earlier versions too) which cause it to crop images a little too closely cutting off pixels at the right and bottom. I have contacted the maintainer about the bug and he replied that he would fix it.

I will post to the discussion board when the next version comes out.

John

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