[tex4ht] TeX4ht does not work properly with default TeXLive Windows install

[Beuthe, Thomas]

UNRESTRICTED | ILLIMITÉ

Since I am sending this to both the TeX4ht and the TeXLive lists, I will summarize.
 
On installation of TeXLive, I did a "hello world" test of TeX4ht,
which did not work properly when executing htlatex test.
The all files were generated properly EXCEPT the .png files.
After some deliberation on the TeX4ht mailing and some helpful
hints from various participants, I found out that what was
missing was the presence of ImageMagic and Ghostscript, as outline below...
 
As suggested, I downloaded and installed ImageMagick,
and made sure the install is in the path using the suggested installation test.
 
Re-running with the original tex4ht.env, or even modifying it as suggested
did not produce the required png files.
 
Then I noticed that ImageMagick uses ghostscript.
I had ghostscript installed, but it was not in the path by default in Windows,
so I added it, and also made sure that I had the latest version of ghostscript loaded,
since my relatively old version was not able to produce png files,
and re-ran, and lo and behold, there were the required .png files,
just a pretty as can be.  Everything now displayed as expected.
 
The conclusion: TeX4ht requires the installation of ImageMagic, which in turn
requires the installation of ghostscript, both of which are not available
by default on a Windows machine, and which are not installed by default
when TeXLive is installed.  Both are required to be on the path, which may
require some manual tweaking of the path for ghostscript.
 
The upshot is that, TeX4ht does not work properly by default when TeXLive is installed
on a windows system.  I assume that virtually all *nix systems have both
ImageMagic and ghostscript/ghostview installed by default, so there never was a problem
on this class of system, but I have trouble believing that I am the first or only person
to try using TeX4ht on a windows system.  Were there never any complaints about this?
 
Is there any way around this?
I'm not sure, but the maintainers of TeXLive and TeX4ht might want to discuss...

In any case, I'm just as happy as can be that I know what the problem is
and can go off in a corner and play around with TeX4ht!

Thanks for your help everyone!
 
Thomas
 

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