Re: [Dvipng] Windows MiKTex/TexLive2007 dvipng problems with fonts

[Jan-Åke Larsson]

Mark Hammond wrote:
> Christoph Schmitt Wrote:
>> METAFONT failed for some reason....
>> dvipng warning: not all characters could be displayed
>> 
>> and new pk-fonts will be generated from dvipng. A second run of dvipng,
>> not changing the contents (the font or font size) of the .tex-files
>> leads to no warning or errors from dvipng.
> 
> I ran into the same issue.  What I found is that even if the quiet flag (-q) 
> is passed to dvipng, miktex-makepk.exe is being invoked with the –verbose 
> flag.  This is causing miktex-makepk.exe to not exit.  I was able to 
> workaround the issue in two steps:
> 1)    When invoking dvipng it is run twice, both times with the quiet, picky, 
> and strict flags.
> 2)    A wrote a proxy application which took the place of miktex-makepk.exe.  
> This proxy simply invoked the real makepk after stripping the --verbose 
> option and replacing it with the –q option.
> Those two alterations made a functional workaround.

This is happening because kpathsea (the TeX path-searching library)
cannot find the appropriate fonts, usually the hang is because it cannot
find _any_ fonts at all. The call to makepk is internal to kpathsea and
not anything that dvipng can influence, which is why the -q flag to
dvipng cannot do anything about the --verbose flag used by kpathsea.

This kind of report has popped up before (when using MIKTeX) and my
suggestion has been to reinstall. My guess is that the affected systems
have everything installed, but the font-searching paths are wrongly set.
I have not before seen the combination of MIKTeX and TeXlive, though.

(In any case, for further hints it would help to know what version of
dvipng you are using, whether it came with MIKTeX or TeXlive, and
whether it is linked to FreeType (best output) or libt1 (fallback) or if
it only has the built-in PK-font support.)

/JÅ

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