After
three days of desperate trial-and-error I seem to have managed to get
latexrender working for
wordpress under Mac
OS X.
First things first : if you only want to include some
symbols in your blog-posts the easiest way to do so is to use
mimetex and the
corresponding
wordpress-plugin written by
Steve Mayer. Follow the
instructions and you will be able to include a limited subset of LaTeX
in your blog within 10 minutes.
If you want more, you have to
work a lot harder. The starting point is to follow Steve’s
blog-entries on latexrender
.
But then under Mac OS X you will probably get error messages
when you activate the plugin. The reason seems to be that most versions
of
imagemagick available for
OS X require X-terminal support and PHP gets confused between the two
shells. A typical error message is
Warning:
copy(70afbabac176169545d01f4bd91f3055.gif): failed to open
stream:
No such file or directory in
/Users/lieven/Sites/wordpress/latexrender/class.latexrender.php on
line
269
[Unparseable or potentially dangerous latex
formula. Error 6 ]
As suggested by Steve Mayer there are
two roads to obtain more information on what goes wrong. The first is to
uncomment the unlink commands _ at the end of the
_class.latexrender.php file and look in the wordpress/latexrender/tmp
directory for which conversions were done and which failed. The normal
latexrender-procedure is : tex->dvi->ps->gif. Probably you will
get all files but the gifs!
Another (and more useful) source of
informations is to look in the error-log of the Apache-WebServer and
see whether you get things like
This is dvips(k) 5.94a
Copyright 2003 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
\’
TeX output 2004.08.30:1433\’ ->
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.ps
. [1]
sh: line 1:
gs: command not found
convert: no decode delegate for this image
format
/Users/lieven/Sites/weblog/latexrender/tmp/
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.ps\’.
convert: missing an image
filename/Users/lieven/Sites/weblog/latexrender/tmp/
0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\’.
identify: unable to
open image 0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\': No such file
or directory.0d48700a5dde6d746813733d26dd8df8.gif\’.
identify: missing an image
filename
`
Here the essential point is that the webserver doesn’t seem to be able to find GhostScript (even if you have several versions installed).
To bypass these problems I did two essential
things : (1) in the class.latexrender.php file I rewrote the
conversions so as to use pdflatex instead of tex (to get
immediately a pdf-file rather than the tex->dvi->ps process) and then
use convert to translate this pdf-file into a gif-file. (2) the
version of convert and include (both part of the
ImageMagick package) are those provided by
Fink but you should be extremely
careful to install the imagemagick-nox package and not
the imagemagick package! After the command
sudo fink
install imagemagick-nox
you are presented with several
configuration choices. Do not choose on auto-pilot the default
choices but look for options specifying that there is no X-support!
After this, everything should work. If you want to have a look at how
I changed the PHP files, mail
me.
latex, latexrender, mac, wordpress
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Posted in iMath
Written on Tue, 31 August 2004 at 2:48 pm
Tags: latex, latexrender, mac, wordpress
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