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Improve error reporting with PDF format and LaTeX

See original GitHub issue

Currently, if users have an old version of dvisvgm (older than 2.4 from May 2018) or if their dvisvgm is not configured correctly (e.g. missing libgs from Ghostscript), video rendering just fails and the users sees unknown option --pdf in their output.

We could improve this:

do a test call to dvisvgm --pdf one time and check the exit status
if it fails, raise an exception and output something along the lines of “Your installation does not support converting PDF to SVG. Consider updating dvisvgm to at least 2.4. If this does not solve the problem, please refer to our documentation.”
add some information in our docs
- On Mac, people must have Ghostscript and libgs installed; installing MacTex does not, by default, install the latter. It is a separate package.
- Sometimes, libgs is installed, but cannot be found by dvisvgm. In this case, the user must execute export LIBS=<path> prior to running manim

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 3 years ago
Comments:9 (9 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

2reactions

leotrscommented, Oct 16, 2020

“Your installation does not support converting PDF to SVG. Consider updating dvisvgm to at least 2.4. If this does not solve the problem, please refer to LINK_IN_TROUBLESHOOTING_SECTION_HERE.”

0reactions

PhilippImhofcommented, Nov 22, 2020

I would say so, yes.