Recent changes to 197: tikz not working on Mac

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Ethan Brown — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 19:02:20 -0000

Yes, that would be great if you could send a bug report to them.

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Roland Baudin — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 17:33:44 -0000

Ok, nice to see it works now.
However, we don't know what the problem really is in macTeX. Maybe I should send a bug report to the macTeX team...

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Ethan Brown — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 20:52:26 -0000

Oh this is amazing, it works now! It took some doing to get all the dependencies right, particularly for the SDK in Xcode, but with the macports installation of latex it now renders everything correctly.

Thanks!

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Roland Baudin — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 21:45:44 -0000

OK, normally dvisvgm should find the GhostScript shared library but for some reason, that's not the case. Even using the direct method by calling dvisvgm with the LIBGS environment variable or with the --libgs option doesn't work. There may be a compatibility issue between macTeX 2024 and your system (it works in a Monterey VM), or a bug somewhere.

Note that typing in a terminal:
dvisvgm -V1
should show GhostScript among the results displayed. If not, then your tikz commands are not rendered when converting the DVI file to SVG.

By the way, I tried to set up a VM with macOS Sonoma but for some reason I couldn't succeed. So I ended with a macOS Ventura VM. I installed macTeX 2024 (using the custom option from the install dialog that allows to add the GhostScript shared library) and alas I got the same situation as you: dvisvgm didn't work with tikz in that case.

Then I completely removed macTeX from this Ventura system (by deleting the following directories: /Library/TeX, /Applications/TeX, /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/texlive).

After that cleanup, I installed macports and texlive. This also installed dvisvgm and the GhostScript shared library and all the required LaTeX programs.

Note that latex, xelatex, dvipng, lualatex, dvisvgm binaries are now installed in /opt/local/bin. So I changed the locations of these programs in TexMaths Config and tried to render your example and... bingo it worked!

So there is a chance that installing texlive from macports could also work in your Sonoma system.

Could you give it a try?

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Ethan Brown — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 05:12:14 -0000

I followed the solution instructions listed above, and it is still not working. Now I get an error when I try to compile the equation:

Script error: the dvi file was not converted to svg!

Please check your system configuration...

I first tried installing GhostscriptExtras, which didn't work. I also set the path directly, which also didn't work. I see in the texmaths confituration that it points to a different location for dvisvgm, namely /usr/local/texlive/2024/bin/universal-darwin/dvisvgm. I followed the sam procedure in the link you shared to edit the dvisvgm file here, but that not only didn't work, but it also made texmaths top compiling at all (it gives the error I listed above).

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Roland Baudin — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 12:50:32 -0000

Your problem seems to be a known issue: dvisvgm which is used to convert DVI images to SVG needs a ghostscript shared library in macOS, otherwise it deosn't work.

A possible solution is given ate the end of this post: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/559640/making-dvisvgm-and-ghostscript-from-mactex-talk-to-each-other

Could you try it on your system?

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Roland Baudin — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 16:56:07 -0000

Maybe the gs binary is not in the path. What is the content of your tmpfile.dat now?

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Ethan Brown — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 19:41:57 -0000

This is strange because GhostScript was indeed installed on my mac. I reinstalled it with brew, then downloaded the package and installed it directly. Neither affected the output.

I did comment out the \documentclass line as well, also no change.

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Roland Baudin — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 19:27:20 -0000

Another point: in your preamble, there is a line at the beginning:

\documentclass[extrafontsizes, 60pt]{memoir} %makes fonts larger, so it is easier to see the glyphs

The latex compiler complains about it. This is because TexMaths already adds an \documentclass[10pt,dvips]{article} at the beginning of the LaTeX file.

#197 tikz not working on Mac

Roland Baudin — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 19:24:04 -0000

OK thanks.

I found the following issue in your tmpfile.dat:

pre-processing DVI file (format version 2)
processing of PostScript specials is disabled (Ghostscript not found)
processing page 1
WARNING: 152 PostScript specials ignored. The resulting SVG might look wrong.
graphic size: 61.674644pt x 8.231855pt (21.676158mm x 2.893166mm)
output written to tmpfile.svg
1 of 1 page converted in 0.341416 seconds

Mine is:

pre-processing DVI file (format version 2)
processing page 1
graphic size: 72.014299pt x 8.231816pt (25.310131mm x 2.893152mm)
output written to tmpfile.svg
1 of 1 page converted in 0.46262 seconds

So it seems that GhostScript is not installed in your machine. I think the problem is that GhostScript is not installed with MacTeX.

In my MacOS VM (that I have set up a few years ago), it seems that I have installed GhostScript as a separate package. This is probably why the equation is well rendered in my case.

You can install GhostScript from here: https://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html