Installation Guides

This page provides user supplied guides and workarounds to installation issues. It supplements the 'Official' Get LaTeXML page.

1. HomeBrew on MacOS

Some issues with dependencies; See the discussion in #929

2. cpanm (development and build systems)

Using cpanminus is a simple and quick method for installing latexml for development. The method is platform-independent, but this guide is written from an Ubuntu usage perspective - please feel free to correct any inaccuracies for your specific platform.

Benefits

• requires no system privileges
• makes it straightforward to work with multiple forks of latexml.
  • Switching the active installation requires a single cpanm . in the chosen repository working directory.
• possible to test multiple perl versions when combined with perlbrew
• automatically installs CPAN perl dependencies, as long as the underlying system packages are already available (e.g. libxml2-dev)
• offers the most recent versions of dependent packages, including the dev linting tools

Local installation

1. You can look for App::cpanminus in your OS package manager, or install it directly via:

   curl -L https://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus
   

2. Setup the local paths in your .bashrc or equivalent initialization script

   export PATH=$HOME/perl5/bin:$PATH
   export PERL5LIB=$HOME/perl5/lib/perl5:$PERL5LIB
   

3. Install LaTeXML and pre-commit hook

   git clone https://github.com/brucemiller/LaTeXML
   cd LaTeXML
   ln -s tools/pre-commit .git/hooks
   cpanm .
   

   Additionally, for certain quick fixes you may want to reinstall without running tests at all (e.g. fixing a typo while prototyping), which you can do neatly via cpanm . --notest.

4. Install linting tools

   cpanm Perl::Critic Perl::Tidy
   

A caveat to keep in mind with this approach is that you may see some weird classes of errors if you install LaTeXML both globally (say via a package manager or classic sudo make install), and locally via cpanminus. It is usually recommended to only install latexml using a single pipeline, to keep things simple.

Tip I. Speeding up test runs on multi core CPUs

The default execution of perl's Test::Harness test runs happens in a single process and thread, and is needlessly slow on modern systems. Setting the HARNESS_OPTIONS environment variable allows to leverage the full compute power of modern systems, e.g. by adding to your .bashrc or equivalent:

    export HARNESS_OPTIONS=j$(grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo):c

On my X230 Thinkpad, an Intel i5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz processor speeds up from 4.5 to 2.2 minutes in running make test, as one example. A gain that compounds while developing.