Manual:Enable TeX

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[edit] Requirements

texvc, the script MediaWiki calls to render the "math" fragments, is included in the "math" sub-directory of the installation
OCaml 3.06 (Objective Caml) or later is required to compile texvc; this can be acquired from http://caml.inria.fr/ if your system doesn't have it available.
The makefile requires GNU make.
Rasterization is done via LaTeX, dvips, ImageMagick, and Ghostscript. These need to be installed (probably available in your Linux distribution) and in the PATH: the commands latex, dvips, convert, gs should all work on the command line.
To work properly with rendering non-ASCII Unicode characters, a supplemental TeX package is needed ("cjk-latex" in Debian)

texvc: Should be in your MediaWiki distribution (in the sub-directory math/).
OCaml: Latest Objective Caml release (must be installed in the sub-directory math/ of your wiki)
GNU make: On Linux, you should have it.; Under Windows, you can use MinGW or Cygwin.; All others: see GNU Make - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
LaTeX and dvips: see TeX Live - TeX Users Group (It's large and a pain to get.); Many Linux systems have LaTeX already installed.
ImageMagick: ImageMagick: Install from Binary Distribution (a binary distribution for MacOSX is provided by Entropy)
Ghostscript: On Linux, you may have it. It is easiest to install from packages for your distribution.; Source files are available from SourceForge.net

Change to the "math" sub-directory of your MediaWiki install
Run 'make' (or 'gmake' if GNU make is not your default make). This should produce the texvc executable.
Enable $wgUseTeX and $wgEnableUploads in your LocalSettings.php and everything should work.

Remember that Tex code is rendered during saving, but only changed data is rerendered and saved:)
More information is included in the "README" file in the "math" directory.
For Debian there is a neat Debian-howto going through the whole procedure step by step, also pointing out some possible traps and problems.