Manual talk:Troubleshooting math display errors

math does not work if safe_mode is enabled. this is because math.php uses backticks, which is unsafe. someone needs to make a math.php which can run in safe_mode. --207.109.251.117 05:01, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
 * I made a patch, its mentioned on Problems_with_texvc --134.58.253.130 22:42, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Can anybody help me? My MediaWiki install creates perfect png images in math/tmp but these are never shown in the browser. The error messages returned are below. I am not running in safe_mode. Many thanks, Joejk2 13:40, 29 April 2006 (UTC)]]

'''My solution to this problem was simple - upgrade to MediaWiki-1.6.3. Bonza! Joejk2 14:47, 29 April 2006 (UTC)]]'''

Still having problems....

Can anybody please suggest why certain symbols fail to render correctly in my install. Something like
 * $$P(r) \alpha r^{n-1} \exp(-kr^2/2\sigma^2)$$

renders beautifully whereas replacing the \alpha with a \propto causes the whole equation to be shown without rendering as P(r) \propto r^{n-1} \exp(-kr^2/2\sigma^2)

Certain other symbols also don't work e.g. \nabla and \sim. The strange thing is that perfect png images are created in my images/math folder - just for some reason they are not correctly displayed.

Many thanks in advance.

Joejk2 18:55, 3 May 2006 (UTC)


 * The reason the above works is that it doesn't have to make a png to lay it out (it's all html). I think you should make sure your latex, dvips, convert are working. this link shows you how to do that in the OS X section. Basiclaly, execute

Check that you got something that worked using a command line like ./texvc '/Library/WebServer/Documents/wiki99/images/tmp' '/Library/WebServer/Documents/wiki99/images/math' '\int_{-N}^{N} e^x\, dx' 'utf-8' (As before, replace the two wiki99/images paths with the math and tmp paths we just created above. Assuming this worked, we should get a cryptic line of output, This is dvips(k) 5.95a Copyright 2005 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com) ' TeX output 2005.07.23:0928' ->  . [1] l4e053ca66cfc79a2397c40aa34c66a25 1 Also look in the images/math directory where there should be a *.png file. (If something went wrong in the conversion to a png, there will also be a *.tex file in images/tmp.) Toss the *.png and *.tex files now. 70.17.83.29 19:05, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Failed to parse (Can't write to or create math output directory)
I got this error when I enabled wgUseTeX after $wgMathPath etc.


 * Did you check for permissions/ownership of the director(ies)? -- Kowey 07:20, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm having a similar problem. Here is the issue. The directories are relative to my webroot, so the file is located at ~/Sites/wiki/up_loads/ et cetera. But the "directory" accorind to "$wgScriptPath" is "/~name/wiki". So if I set it up so that the path points to a real place on the computer, it writes the files and the browser is pointed to a relative path on my computer (bad) and if I set it up so that the path points to the web directory, the file doesn't exist on the OS and it would let it write there. Any suggestions? 70.17.83.29 19:01, 4 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Sorry to bother, figured this out on my own. Will post result over at 70.17.83.29 19:38, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Failed to parse (Unknown error)
What helped me was a recompilation of the ocaml stuff via

cd /var/www/mediawiki/mywiki/math make clean make

Good luck --Sigbert 17:33, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Stupid failure reasons
I'm not sure where to mention it, but texvc was failing for me because /dev/null was not writable by Apache on the default permissions for Fedora 12. Dragons flight 01:40, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

can't get it to work
I just upgraded OS X to 10.6 and now I can't get equations to work. I ran the which and got

$ ls -lH `which gs` `which latex` `which dvips` `which convert` -rwxr-xr-x 1 root  wheel  7204224 Dec 15  2009 /usr/local/bin/convert lrwxr-xr-x 1 root  wheel       21 Apr 29 22:54 /usr/local/bin/gs -> /usr/local/bin/gs-X11 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root  wheel   492056 Aug 27  2009 /usr/texbin/dvips lrwxr-xr-x 1 root  wheel        6 Apr 29 22:51 /usr/texbin/latex -> pdftex

and the texvc works great too. What should I do? 129.2.141.193 16:29, 28 September 2010 (UTC)