On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 07:10:57PM +0100, Ken Moffat wrote: > On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 06:52:19PM +0100, Ken Moffat wrote: > > > > I'm still on 3.14 (you know me - I don't bother updating most > > packages unless I become aware of problems). > > For some reason, I booted a 7.7 system this afternoon. I've found a > .dvi from when I had time to play with the TeX book, will reboot to > a current system [ which is what I had intended to be running! ] and > rebuild evince. Stay tuned. > In fact, I did not need to rebuild - because this is a test system, I think I had built some TeX stuff before building evince, and it claimed to support the DVI backend. Fortunately, I started evince from a term and pointed it to the dvi on the commandline.
At first, I thought it did not work - th evince window came up, but was empty. But in the term I saw TeX output, including a mention of kpathsea (I have a 40-line term!) [ earlier output snipped ] Transcript written on cmbx10.log. mktexpk: /home/ken/.texlive2014/texmf-var/fonts/pk/ljfour/public/cm/cmbx10.600pk: successfully generated. kpathsea: Running mktexpk --mfmode / --bdpi 600 --mag 1+0/600 --dpi 600 cmr10 mktexpk: Running mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1+0/600; nonstopmode; input cmr10 This is METAFONT, Version 2.7182818 (TeX Live 2014 - BLFS) (preloaded base=mf) (/opt/texlive/2014/texmf-dist/fonts/source/public/cm/cmr10.mf (/opt/texlive/2014/texmf-dist/fonts/source/public/cm/cmbase.mf) (/opt/texlive/2014/texmf-dist/fonts/source/public/cm/roman.mf (/opt/texlive/2014/texmf-dist/fonts/source/public/cm/romanu.mf [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] [79] [80] [81] [82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] [88] [89] [90]) [snipped] and then it finished with Font metrics written on cmr10.tfm. Output written on cmr10.600gf (128 characters, 24096 bytes). Transcript written on cmr10.log. mktexpk: /home/ken/.texlive2014/texmf-var/fonts/pk/ljfour/public/cm/cmr10.600pk: successfully generated. And at that point the rendered document appeared in evince's window. So, to answer the original question - if evince's configure reports that the DVI backend is enabled, it should be able to display a dvi file - provided that the texlive progs are on the user's PATH (yes, BLFS does that at least for a normal user, but I set my PATH differnetly). But the display will take some time (several seconds for what is a minimal document with only 5 lines of text, so perhaps several minutes for a long real document) because it runs a series of TeX programs, so best to do this from a term in case there are any problems. Also, I don't know _where_ the TeX progs write these logs, and after a succesful run I cannot see them - so debugging any problems might be harder than normal. ĸen -- Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
