#sphinx-doc

hello, newbie question - anyone know what set of packages are needed to get sphinx to generate PDF on fedora 20? Works fine on RHEL6 but there's been some sort of package explosion over at the texlive project and I cannot figure it out.

aconway: As in what TeX packages? Or distro packages? Do you have a log message?

sdough: trying to use distro packages. on RHEL6 yum install texlive-latex pulls in 12 dependencies and it just works. I am up to 1306 (not kidding!) texlive-* packages on fedora now and still no joy. I get various error messages depending on what collection of packages I try with. Missing .sty files

Ouch. What's the error message at this point?

sdough: it looks like the folks at texlive decided to package every file individually!

If it's packaging I asume that's Fedora folks.

Have you read the docs on the Sphinx PDF generator?

sdough: Right now I don't get anything that is clearly an error message but the process stalls at an interactive pdflatex prompt, the last lines are:

(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/psnfss/t1phv.fd)

! Missing $ inserted.

<inserted text>

$

l.119 \tableofcontents

?

please don't paste it here

sorry!

try http://dpaste.com/

no worries it's an IRC thing

so click the paste button and then put the link in here

saves those reading the backlog from having to wade through lots of log output

http://sphinx-doc.org/builders.html#sphinx.buil... looks relevant - it mentions dependencies

sdough: yes, I pulled those in, several hundred more dependencies came with them.

Yet not enough? hrm...

for those following along at home we're currently at http://dpaste.com/1QE3NFE

yeah that really isn't a clear error message is it

I take it you specified the latex_documents config value as it instructs?

sdough: sphinx-quickstart did it for me (btw *seriously* impressive job on making it easy to get started)

Thanks go to the devs on that one; I haven't contributed code here yet.

sdough: (also great documentation but I guess it would be ironic othewise ;)

indeed

sometimes the docs are under-specified though

sdough: it's a great day in my life when I can find under-specified docs.

aconway: Do you have a test case that demonstrates this behavior?

sdough: I can tar up my doc tree and send you a list of the packages I have installed. You probably need a system with similar texlive packaging.

Are you doing anything with special directives to pdflatex?

I just tested and was able to build my (non-trivial) documentation as PDF, so I'm not able to reproduce the problem at the moment.

If not tarring it up (or a link to the repo) would be very helpful.

sdough: nope. The same setup works fine for me on RHEL 6 so it is something to do with the texlive packages on fedora 20 (which are very different from RHEL6)

Can you diff the list of packages (with versions) that the two report?

The ones on RHEL will be older (unless I'm missing something) so I wouldn't expect Fedora's to be too old...

s/packages/LaTeX packages/ if it wasn't clear

sdough: the fedora ones are newer but it seems like the package structure has totally changed. There are just 12 packages on RHEL 6. Of those texlive and texlive-latex are the only ones that still exist on fedora. On fedora I am up to 1306 texlive-* other packages. texlive-latex on fedora has over a dozen direct dependencies, dunno how many indirect. The ones mentioned in the sphinx doc all brought in hundreds more. It's mad

sdough: HA! Just got rst2pdf to work on fedora!

sdough: I think I'll detect & pick. It'd be better to have a single method on all platforms, but not if it requires 100s of dependencies.

sdough: I was using pandoc-pdf before and we did notice it pulled in a silly number of texlive packages, so this is not a sphinx-specific issue.

sdough: thanks for your help

aconway: Happy to help, and glad you got it working!

sdough: first day but so far I like it!

sdough: arrgh! RHEL 7 has the same insane packages as fedora but no rst2pdf. I think I will cry.

aconway: :(

aconway: try make help to see available generators

sdough: latexpdf is the only one that does pdfs. I am now installing every texlive package in the universe, lets see if that works...

sdough: installed everything in sight, getting the same error now on RHEL 7 that I pasted for fedora.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sdough: nice unicode-art!

It's not productive, but it does convey my current understanding of how to fix this situation.

Are you able to get packages from CTAN instead of the seemingly-broken ones available on other platforms?

sdough: I could experiment but I really need to get something that works on stock fedora/rhel.

And you have to get a PDF? Would an epub work?

sdough: you know what? Everyone has a browser right? :)

I suppose so. Well - not RMS. :p

sdough: I think I will quietly drop PDFs until somebody complains. Why didn't I think of that???

Browsers can also print HTML to PDF.

(Or fancier conversion but still)

You lose pretty typesetting but hopefully it'll be functional enough.

sdough: yep, and by the time somebody says "hey where's the pdf" we will probably have rst2pdf on RHEL :)

One can hope so, yes.

sdough: thanks again!

Happy to help!

sdough: I'll drop in a but report in case anybody wants to figure out whether its a sphinx or texlive problem. Not my problem anymore :)

sdough: /but/bug/

4bdis

oops