[GiNaC-list] doxygen, TeX, latex, and pdflatex

[Richard Haney]

It's nice that the INSTALL document now gives at least _some_ "warning"
about extra software that will be needed for the build, namely:  "To
build the GiNaC tutorial and reference manual the doxygen utility (it
can be downloaded from http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen ) and TeX
are necessary."

But that is all the documentation says about these packages.

But it also seems that this information, besides being rather scant,
may also be a bit misleading.

A case-insensitive "grep" of "C:/gnu/ginac-1.3.5" reveals no occurrence
of "tex" except as a part of "text" or as a part of variable names such
as CONFIG_TEX_TRUE, LATEX, and PDFLATEX.  A search through the
configure output and the config.log output of ginac-1.3.4 suggests that
configure does not look for any TeX executable or library as such, but
instead looks for doxygen, latex, and pdflatex,  but no details are
given there as to what configure specifically is looking for.

Then a search for these keywords in the ginac-1.3.5 configure script
seems to confirm that these packages (as executables with presumably
several different extensions attempted) are typically searched for in
the PATH variable (which presumably is the environment variable by that
name) and that the lines

  ac_cv_path_DOXYGEN="$DOXYGEN" # Let the user override the test with a
path.

  ac_cv_path_LATEX="$LATEX" # Let the user override the test with a
path.

  ac_cv_path_PDFLATEX="$PDFLATEX" # Let the user override the test with
a path.

allow the user to specify the pathnames for these three executables by
setting environment variables or using command line arguments, rather
than having to have the executables "installed" in a PATH directory. 
(If true, that's nice to know, but I don't recall seeing anything to
this effect even in the "./configure --help" output.)

To my knowledge, LaTex is a control ("macro" ?) package for TeX --
actually a substantial family of packages, one of which needs to be
chosen, but conceivably it could be also have now evolved (with name in
lower case) into a "stand-alone" executable, which is what the
configure script seems to be looking for.  Moreover, I could find no
suggestion either in the ginac-1.3.5 configure script or in the
ginac-1.3.4 output (including config.log) that configure looks for
anything with a root name of "tex".

I have no idea what pdflatex is except that it seems likely by its name
to be some extension of the LaTeX concept for use in creating .pdf
files.

But all of this is a lot of guessing based on what I found.

Also, even though the .info documentation says "Perl is needed by the
built process as well, since some of the source files are automatically
generated by Perl scripts.", a case-insensitive grep of
"C:/gnu/ginac-1.3.5" reveals that "perl" appears only in a few comment
lines and thus seems to be irrelevant to "ginac-1.3.5".

Can someone provide some clarification as to what is needed here?

I also recall that TeX packages are quite varied and can be quite huge
and thus likely to be much more than is needed here.  Can anyone
suggest an appropriate TeX package if that is what's needed?  Similar
considerations apply for LaTeX as well, if that is what's needed.

I am interested in building the html and pdf documentation for GiNaC.

Richard Haney


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