[OS X TeX] Mysterious behavior of Preview.app

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 May 2008, at 10:37 am, Axel E. Retif wrote:

> On the other hand, I said I wasn't going to report the test with  
> the new dvipdfmx-20080515-i386-darwin, but I will because it  
> doesn't run on Tiger (I put it in my ~/bin directory, which, as you  
> will see, takes precedence):
>
> dvipdfmx nfssfont
> dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libpng12.0.dylib
>   Referenced from: /Users/axretif/bin/dvipdfmx
>   Reason: image not found
> Trace/BPT trap
>
> The reason is that in Tiger there is no /usr/X11/ but /usr/X11R6/,  
> and even in /usr/X11R6/lib/ there is no libpng12.0.dylib

This indicates that dvipdfmx was dynamically linked with libpng on  
the developer's system; that's not a good idea if the binary is to be  
distributed. It would be better to link libpng statically, then the  
binary is independent of the location (or presence) of the library on  
the end user's machine.

In TeX Live, we try hard to avoid such dependencies, so that the  
binaries are as portable as possible. But during development it may  
not always be topmost in the developer's mind.

JK