latex

[Zazz]

I got latex up and running on my Z. It is a minimal installation, consisting only of latex, xdvi and dvips. I also got ghostscript so that pdfs can be distilled and xdvi does preview embedded graphics (which looks gorgeous on the little screen). Everything runs at very usable speed and does not consume too much space (3.5MB for latex with a full set of cm/ams fonts and 2.1MB for ghostscript v8.14 without fonts, all sizes compressed), so keeping it on the internal flash of the Z poses no problems. The setup works completely without pk fonts, they would eat up too much space and wear down the internal flash by their random recreation. The present installation only contains the base system, so carefully pick and install those additional style files you need (they compress well). You would need about another 1.5MB compressed for a full set of base35 type1 files (urw or adobe, not provided), shared by dvips and ghostscript. Due to the minimalistic nature of the present setup, it is recommeded to have a desktop with a complete texmf tree to fill in the needed style files. I realize I may need to add few selected binaries like bibtex or makeindex and will do so in due course. I don\'t use lyx, so don\'t ask for it. The binaries can downloaded from here.

[jandr]

Hi everyone,
this post made me happy, as pdaXrom does everything I need (really well too) except for displaying the DVI files that my tex installation produces.  The TeX installation I got from <http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Kracht/zaurus/zaurus.html> is happy, but the dvipdfm isn't.  And xpdf itself seems horribly broken in any case, and all other ROMs that have a dvi viewer seem to require libs that are incompatible with pdaXrom.

But the site Zazz listed seems to be permanently down!  Does anyone out there know where to get Zazz's, or any other, DVI viewer that'll work on pdaXrom?  A working dvi->ps + ghostscript toolchain would be a fine mechanism too.

thanks, and thanks for pdaXrom, it's great!
jg

p.s. silly side question: how does one get a backquote character from the keyboard in pdaXrom?


[I've got a new-to-me SL-C760 + 256MB Viking SD & AmbiCom 802.11b CF cards.]

[Zazz]

Yes, my site is permanently down (hardware died), sorry for that. ScottYelich was kind enough to host a copy on his site. Note that this LaTeX setup has not been modified since May 2004 and has only been tested under pdaxrom 1.0.5. Good luck.

[jandr]

Wow, that's fast service... thanks Zazz, and Scott.  I'll let the forum know how it all works in Kathrin RC8.

[jandr]

Well, no surprise I had limited success: zazz' TeX runs fine (once I remembered to unsetenv TEXINPUTS) and produces DVI files that look fine on my desktop machine.  But on the Z the included xdvi bombs with "illegal exception" and the included dvips gives bad postscript (GNU, ESP and Alladin gs all say "Error: /limitcheck in -file-").

So is anyone with a Kathrin SDK willing to give packaging up xdvi (or xdvik or advi) a shot?  You'd be helping out a poor Fortran coder who knows nothing of GUIs.   And if t helps, I'm about to send off a little donation to the pdaXrom guys.

thanks
jg

p.s. For kicks I tried zazz's gs too, but it bombs with "Unrecoverable error: rangecheck in setscreen" even when given a known-good file.  I imagine this is either a kathrin-library-mismatch or a missing-font issue, but in any case I'm not even at a place to have .ps files to give it.

[Zazz]

Yes, most likely an incompatibility due to the changes in fp-emulation. If recompiling is not an option, a quick and dirty solution would be to put the old libs from v1.0.5 (libc, libm, maybe libX*, etc) into a separate directory and make LD_LIBRARY_PATH wrappers (tiny shell scripts setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to this dir and then exec'ing the true binaries) for the misbehaving apps.

[jandr]

Sir. I thank you!  Not knowing how to extract 1.0.5's lib[cm] from the ROM image, I simply grabbed the libc6 deb for woody, unpacked it, set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and voila!  xdvi works beautifully.

gs still has issues but that's of no concern for me... I've now got a full LaTeX authoring environment on my Z!  (It's one of the main uses I wanted it for.)  Thanks so much!  

[jamesannan]

I'm using the image file from

http://www.snowelm.com/~t/doc/tips/20031120.en.html

It is 60MB but with a 512MB SD card who cares. I have written a few papers and presentations on the Z (mine is an 860 with Sharp Rom) - not always to completion, but significant parts. I plan to use the Z with cfxga card to give a few presentations in a couple of months, to save carrying a laptop around..

James

[jandr]

Well, I can finally contribute something concrete to this thread: imagine my amazement to find that gcc in kathrin comes complete with X libraries and headers, including Xaw and Motif.  So I was able to compile a 1.1.0-happy xdvi straight from the original sources.  You can get the binaries from
here.

Thanks Zazz for doing all the hard work!
jg

[MarcusKracht]

I have just read the emails concerning latex. Having put up my
own solution I would be curious to see what caused the hickup
with dvipdfm. Maybe I forgot to say something on my website
(www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Kracht/zaurus/zaurus.html), so
that if you follow the given instructions you might not succeed.
My own installation (for pdaXrom version 1.0.5) works without
any trouble, recently I even managed to include txfonts. xpdf needs
some attention with the fonts. You need to provide some of them
(as I explained with the dingbats). Just pay attention to the log
of pdflatex when you run it on a big machine. It tells you what
fonts it uses at the end. I included them all, because my latex
resides on the SD card (no worry, it runs very fast!).

I have updated my page, so take a look. Zazz, thanks for providing
xdvi-awk.bin. I had a version of xdvi that kept looking for xdvi.bin.
I gave it xdvi-awk.bin under the name xdvi.bin and that seems to
work. I shall experiment with dvips and ghostview to see how they
work and then wrap up my installation for public use.

I do not know about version 1.1.0, so maybe things are different
there. Since my 1.0.5 works mostly fine, I have no incentive to
change yet.

Keep me posted,

                     Marcus

PS Maybe someone can create an ipk at some point? I do not know
how to do these things but am happy to help with whatever I
know about latex on the zaurus.

PPS Someone asked about the backquote. It's <Fn> plus the
key right next to it, which has Japanese characters on it.

[alan]

I don't use lyx, so don't ask for it.

I'm sorry to ask for this, but any luck Lyx might be cross compiled for the Z ? It's so much easier to create latex files with it...

The exportation module is of course very important in this prog; but maybe (i even don't know if it's possible) we could deal without it, at least at first time. Procucing .lyx files on the Z and then exporting them to pdf on a PC would be not that bad...

But of course, a fully fonctionnal lyx installation would be the best !

I'm so sorry i'm not able to cross compile anything, but is there any volunteer ?

[MarcusKracht]

Okay, Zazz and Jandr, I am back in the business. After Installing RC9 and doing the
dirty work, I have managed to also use the ztex and xdvi. See my report on
http://kracht.humnet.ucla.edu/marcus/zaurus/zaurusrc9.html

I am stuck with ghostview. I get a screen for a second then it stop and, among mnay other
stuff, it gives the following error:

(...)
Error: /undefinedresult in --div--
Operand stack:
          Fa 136 --nostringval-- w 46000.0 -0.0
(...)

It seems to be doing fine for a while and then a hickup. I have had this problem for
a while and cannot get it to disappear.

dvipdfm claims to need fonts.map but I cannot see anywhere in my configs that
I told it to look for these fonts. kpsewhich does not find anything ... But latex works,
xdvi, dvips work perfectly.

Any suggestions?  

-- Marcus

[jandr]

I am stuck with ghostview. I get a screen for a second then it stop and, among mnay other
stuff, it gives the following error:

(...)
Error: /undefinedresult in --div--
Operand stack:
          Fa 136 --nostringval-- w 46000.0 -0.0
(...)

It seems to be doing fine for a while and then a hickup. I have had this problem for
a while and cannot get it to disappear.

dvipdfm claims to need fonts.map but I cannot see anywhere in my configs that
[div align=\"right\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Hi Marcus,
It sounds like you're still having library issues with gs... try following my instructions [a href=\"http://interstel.net/~girash/zaurus/#oldlibs]here[/url] to get gs going.  (I see on your page that you give similar instructions as on mine, but you say export LD_PRELOAD=/lib/glibcc_s.so instead of export LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libgcc_s.so.  Is the extra g intentional?  If not that may be the problem.)

For dvipdf, I wasn't able to get dvipdfm to work at all, but using the same technique as for gs (but replacing 'gs' with 'dvipdf' everywhere in the script file & its filename of course) I got the dvipdf from Zazz' gs distribution working great.  I may also have had to copy a bunch of files from my desktop's latex tree over in order to avoid the same fonts.map problem you had; I'm sorry but I honestly can't remember.  Then again, your page says that you've got dvipdfm to work on "simple files", so it's possible that all my files are simple and I've just never come across the bug that yours trigger.  

j

p.s. I'm glad to hear that the OCAML was useful for you.

[C760 / Ambicom Wifi CF / various SD cards, none of which I'm happy with]

[MarcusKracht]

Hi Jandr,

here is an update. I use dvipdfm, as provided in the earlier package which I got from
somewhere (and mirrored on my site). Maybe the stuff in the gs package will work
as well. But the devipdfm, after being wrapped, now seems to work. I do not know
what caused the hickup. I noticed though that initially the rc9 would often forget the
paths and I had to issue a friendly reminder that it should include /usr/bin/latex in its
search path. Also, occasionally kpsewhich would not give any meaningful results. I
was puzzled. But now, apparently, things work. Except for ghostview ... And the
error was only on the website (now corrected), not in my files. So, I am afraid, I still
don't know what the problem is. I keep searching.

-- Marcus

[jandr]

Error: /undefinedresult in --div--

Hi again Marcus,
I just upgraded to rc10 and encountered the same problem as you... I think the solution is to populate /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/ with whatever your desktop machine has on it.  According to the gs.README file, you might have to "update Fontmap if necessary".  (I didn't have to.)

Of course, you may have already figured this out.    

jg