[tex-live] TeX4ht does not work properly with default TeXLive Windows install (solved)

[Beuthe, Thomas]

UNRESTRICTED | ILLIMITÉ

Summary of problem:

After installing TeXLive 2009 and running htlatex on a windows
system, TeX4ht did not generate any png files.

Solution:

After some debugging, the problem was that TeX4ht needed to use the
"convert" utility which is installed by default on most
linux/unix operating systems. On Windows systems, "convert"
means convert from fat32 to ntfs disc mount. A way of
correcting this is to install ImageMagic for Windows, and also
install a modern version of ghostscript that can convert ps to
png and also make sure that both are in the path. So, this is
one solution to this problem.

After more discussion it turns out that a hidden version of
ghostscript is installed with TeXLive that could be used by
TeX4ht to generate the png files. instead of ImageMagic + gs

It involved making a simple to TeX4ht.env

I added the new change to the TeXLive 2009 install on my
machine and tested it to death. Other than an occasional
hiccup while producing between 2500 and 10,000 sequential
png files, possibly due to an error condition generated
due to system load (?), everthing worked perfectly.

The change was made by Akira Kakuto, and Reinhard
Kotucha let me know about it. 

In fact, using gs to do the conversion produces png files
 that are often less than half the size of those produced
by ImageMagic! I asked about this, and Reinhard said
this is normal. In fact, it has been shown that gs
sometimes produces png files that are very much smaller than
ImageMagic.

The file that was changed was

C:\texlive\2009\texmf-dist\tex4ht\base\win32\tex4ht.env

I have included a copy.
In case it has not been doen already, can this be added
to the latest distribution please?

Thanks to all those who helped me resolve this problem.

Thomas





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