Manual talk:Math

Where can I download the extension?
Searching for "texvc" in the english wikipedia shows me that:

"Like the rest of MediaWiki, it is available under the terms of the GNU GPL from the MediaWiki site."

When I click the link to the MediaWiki site, I can't find anything about a texvc download. If I type "texvc" into the search field, I come to this site. But I can't find a hint how and where I can download the software. 84.134.179.36 21:23, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

texvc is included with the MediaWiki download. See the "math" directory under your installation. There's a README for how to make texvc. Kaolin 00:59, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

How to set permissions on newly rendered png's?
For some security reasons we drive php as cgi-script using suphp. So all the mediawiki stuff is executed under a userid different from wwwrun. Since texvc is started via php, the resulting files are owned by this userid, too. This is nice, but the file permissions of the png-graphics is read/write only for the owner. As the pngs are loaded without php, wwwrun must have read access. I tried to fix this using acls on all the directories containing the math-graphics but with no effect. The resulting files are read/writeable only by the files owner. Any idea how to avoid this?

I think the easiest place would be to add a system/exec chmod command in includes/Math.php Kaolin 01:03, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

The 'math temp directory'
Failed to parse (Can't write to or create math temp directory)

It seems that the above stated is a common error message people get after compiling texvc and enabling $wgUseTeX in LocalSettings.php.

Unfortunately I couldn't find a solution to the problem on the web (but several error messages in wikis around the world...) and the README file in the math subdirectory of the wiki installation only states

Ensure that the temporary and math directories exist and can be written to by the user account the web server runs under

But it doesn't say what temporary directory is meant. Creating tmp, temp, temporary as well as math/tmp, math/temp, math/temporary, all with 777, does not help. Could anyone please say which directory is meant and how the permissions should be set to make it work?

I installed the last stable MediaWiki (1.11.0) locally, running MacOS X 10.4.10. --Ileo 11:27, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

After looking through includes/Math.php I found that the directory Mediwiki wants is "images/tmp". I chown'd the images directory to apache, and it was then happy to create the directory for me. Kaolin 01:02, 17 February 2008 (UTC)


 * My images folder contains both a /math folder and a /tmp folder. My /math folder was set to 777 but not /tmp. On changing the permissions of /tmp from 755 to 777, the error message cleared. Now I have a new error message to solve:

Failed to parse (PNG conversion failed; check for correct installation of latex, dvips, gs, and convert)
 * It looks like some help can be found on the page "Troubleshooting math display errors" --93.97.21.214 18:11, 2 March 2009 (UTC)