Installation
Pre-requisites
As well as a functional web server and Joomla! installation moslatex relies on the presence of several command line utilities on the server. Specifically it is left to the user to ensure the presence of the following binaries or suitable replacements for them:
- latex
- dvips
- convert
There are many distributions from which you can obtain a LaTeX binary. Two examples are:
The convert binary can be obtained as a component of ImageMagick.
Additionally you may wish to install additional LaTeX packages to enable extra LaTeX tags to be used, for example the default moslatex preamble includes PSTricks which may not be included in your latex distribution by default.
Configuration
You can install moslatex via the Joomla admin panel by uploading the zip file via your web browser like any other mambot. Post install setup options are set under the mambots configuration screen (accessed via the 'Mambots->Site Mambots' menu in the admin panel). From this screen you can change the following options:
- Path to LaTeX binary - This is the path to 'latex', the default is a UNIX path which will need to be changed for hosts using other platforms or if your latex distribution is installed in a non-standard location.
- Path to dvips binary - This is the path to 'dvips', the default is a UNIX path which will need to be changed for hosts using other platforms or if your latex distribution is installed in a non-standard location.
- Path to LaTeX binary - This is the path to 'convert', the default is a UNIX path which will need to be changed for hosts using other platforms or if your ImageMagick distribution is installed in a non-standard location.
- Automatically clean up temporary files - When converting a given piece of markup to an image several temporary files are generated. By default (when this option is 'On') these files are are cleaned up each time moslates processes something. For debugging however it can be useful to turn this off so that you can see the output of the various utilities.
- Use cache where possible to prevent re-processing - By default (when this option is set to 'On')if moslatex has previously generated then it is not re-processed, instead the original image is re-displayed. If set to 'Off' then the image will be re-generated each page view, this is bad for performance but can be useful for testing changes to moslatex.
- Additional command line options for LaTeX - Additional options to be pre-pending to the command line arguments list for 'latex' (Advanced users only).
- Additional command line options for dvips - Additional options to be pre-pending to the command line arguments list for 'dvips' (Advanced users only).
- Additional command line options for convert - Additional options to be pre-pending to the command line arguments list for 'convert' (Advanced users only).
- LaTeX preamble - The preamble sets the list of LaTeX packages to use, among other things. The default
package list includes the following common packages:
- amsmath
- amsfonts
- amssymb
- pst-plot
- color
Of the options described above the important are the paths and the preambles. The other options should be functional for all hosts if left at defaults.