[tex-live] Bug report: tex4ht and xtpipes

[Peter Heslin]

I just installed texlive 2007 from a DVD (full install) on an Ubuntu
Edgy amd64 machine.  I chose to install in /opt/texlive and to create
symlinks to the binaries in /usr/local/bin, etc.

Everything works extremely well, and I'm glad to have made the switch
from tetex. (Great job, everyone -- it's especially nice to have XeTeX
included!)  But I did run into one small problem.

When running "mk4ht oolatex" on a file, I got a stream of java errors.
I tracked it down to a setting in
/opt/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex4ht/base/unix/tex4ht.env

This section refers to files that don't exist on my system:

<ooxtpipes>
.4oo mv %%0.4oo %%0.tmp
.4oo java -classpath /usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/bin xtpipes -i /usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/xttl/ -o %%0.4oo %%0.tmp
.4om mv %%1.4om %%1.tmp
.4om java -classpath /usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/bin xtpipes -i /usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/xttl/ -o %%1.4om %%1.tmp
</ooxtpipes>

I changed these lines to refer to the files in the texlive tree as follows:

<ooxtpipes>
.4oo mv %%0.4oo %%0.tmp
.4oo java -classpath /opt/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex4ht/bin xtpipes -i /opt/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex4ht/xttl/ -o %%0.4oo 
%%0.tmp
.4om mv %%1.4om %%1.tmp
.4om java -classpath /opt/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex4ht/bin xtpipes -i /opt/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex4ht/xttl/ -o %%1.4om 
%%1.tmp
</ooxtpipes>

Now everything works perfectly.

Shouldn't the texlive tex4ht.env file refer to the files in the
texlive tree?

PS.  I've had problems with xtpipes before.  At some point I think the
Debian tetex maintainers removed it because it allegedly did not work
with whatever free Java runtime Debian ships with.  This broke tex4ht
for my purposes, and that is one of the reasons I decided to switch to
texlive.  I have installed the Sun runtime, and this works fine.

Thanks for all of your work on texlive!

Best wishes,

Peter

-- 
Peter Heslin (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin)