[Dvipng] Re: Detecting unsupported DVI

[Jan-Åke Larsson]

address@hidden skrev 11/30/2010 07:40 PM:
> Hello, I'm a developer from the LyX project and we're interested to know if 
> there's the possibility to detect (quickly) if a DVI file will not be 
> rendered correctly (e.g. it uses PSTricks or TikZ), so we can switch to the 
> legacy method, which is much slower but should work also with TikZ and 
> PSTricks.
> I'm not a true expert of the DVI format but I think dvipng encounters 
> problems with certain "specials". I've found a pretty command-line tool, dvii 
> [1], which would allow us to easily detect if such "specials" are present and 
> avoid to launch dvipng, which gives some warnings on stderr but requires too 
> much time.
> Please try to reply ASAP as soon we'll release LyX 2.0!

Yes, --picky will do what you want, from the man page

 --picky*
       No images are output when a warning occurs. Normally, dvipng will
       output an image in spite of a warning, but there may be something
       missing in this image. One reason to use this option would be if
       you have a more complete but slower fallback converter. Mainly,
       this is useful for failed figure inclusion and unknown \special
       occurrences, but warnings will also occur for missing or unknown
       color specs and missing PK fonts.

Using this, you can have the best of both worlds: quick rendering of
pages with no warnings, and use the slower fallback for the pages
missing in the output sequence.

The imminent 1.14 release will also have a switch --norawps that will
completely disable trying to render all raw PS specials, even those that
dvipng (thinks it) can handle.

Best,
/JÅ