     [file macros.texi not included]
Installing dvipng should be simple: merely ./configure, make, and make install.

Prerequisites
=============

  * The GD Graphics Draw library, libgd

     The drawing library libgd is necessary, and is downloadable at http://www.boutell.com/gd, and there are binary packages for most operating systems from their respective distributors. In any case, the latest version of the library installs using autoconf so it should not be difficult for you to install it from source, and then proceed with installing dvipng.

  * The path-searching library kpathsea

     Kpathsea is most likely included in your LaTeX installation, but it may happen that ./configure does not find it; see below. If you do not have it, download it from http://www.ctan.org and compile it. I have no experience with this, so I cannot help much here.

  * The font-rendering library FreeType 2

     While not strictly necessary, a recent FreeType 2 is recommended since dvipng currently will produce better-quality images when this library is available. To take advantage of this, you should have at least FreeType 2.1.9.

     FreeType 2 will enable direct support for PostScript and TrueType fonts, so that dvipng will not need to generate bitmapped variants on disk of the TeX fonts since modern TeX distributions include PostScript versions of them. Then, you can render images at different (and unusual) resolutions without cluttering the disk with lots of bitmapped fonts.

     Finally, it will enable subfont support in dvipng. That is, if you want to render CJK-LaTeX characters, you must have FreeType 2 installed.

  * libpng and libz

     To be able to compress and write PNG files to disk, dvipng (or really libgd) uses libpng which in turn uses libz. These should be available on any modern system, if not, download them and install them.

  * The texinfo package

     This is needed for building the documentation.

Configure
=========

The first step is to configure the source code, telling it where various files will be.  To do so, run

     ./configure OPTIONS

(Note: if you have fetched dvipng from CVS rather than a regular release, you will have to first generate ./configure by running autoconf 2.53 or later.)

On many machines, you will not need to specify any options, but if configure cannot determine something on its own, you'll need to help it out. For a list of the options type

     ./configure --help

On some machines, the libraries will be installed in directories that are not in the linker's search path. This will generate an error when running ./configure, indicating that it cannot find libgd or libkpathsea (most likely). You then need to specify the path to the respective library's object files. They are typically called e.g., libgd.a or libgd.so. If they are located in e.g., /sw/local/lib, do

     ./configure LDFLAGS=-L/sw/local/lib

If the library is available as a shared object file (.so), the runtime linker may also need to be told where to find the library, then use

     ./configure LDFLAGS='-L/sw/local/lib -R/sw/local/lib'

When either of these is necessary, it is likely that the C header files are also installed in directories that are not in the C preprocessor's search path. This will also generate an error when running ./configure, indicating that it cannot find e.g., gd.h or kpathsea.h (most likely). You then need to specify the path to the respective library's C header files. If they are located in e.g., /sw/local/include, do

     ./configure CPPFLAGS=-I/sw/local/include

On my SUN Solaris workstation, I had to combine this into

     ./configure CPPFLAGS='-I/sw/local/include -I/sw/tex/teTeX/1.0/include'\
         LDFLAGS='-L/sw/local/lib -R/sw/local/lib -L/sw/tex/teTeX/1.0/lib/'

where the backslash denotes a continuation of the line.

Build/install
=============

Once configure has been run, simply enter

     make

at the prompt to compile the C code, and build the documentation files. To install the files into the locations chosen earlier, type

     make install

You may need special privileges to install, e.g., if you are installing into system directories.

Installation outside the texmf tree
===================================

In some cases, a dvipng binary installed outside the texmf tree will not be able to find virtual fonts, or the PostScript font maps (normally used by dvips). This may be because only $SELFAUTOLOC, $SELFAUTODIR, and $SELFAUTOPARENT are used in the texmf tree configuration file texmf.cnf. If so, give the switch --enable-selfauto-set to ./configure. This will make dvipng adjust these three internally so that kpathsea thinks that dvipng is installed in the texmf tree.

Installation for non-privileged users
=====================================

Often people without system administration privileges want to install software for their private use. In that case you need to specify more options to the configure script, usually this is done by using the --prefix option to the configure script, and let it point to the personal home directory. In that way, resulting binaries will be installed under the bin subdirectory of your home directory, manual pages under man and so on. That way, it is reasonably easy to maintain a bunch of additional packages, since the prefix argument is supported by most configure scripts.

You'll have to add something like /home/myself/bin to your PATH shell variable, if it isn't there already, and similarly set the INFOPATH and MANPATH variables to be able to access the documentation.