Support and document installation of LaTeXML via homebrew on Mac OS X

[asmaier]

Many people use homebrew as package manager on Mac OS X (see https://brew.sh/analytics/os-version/). Unfortunately LaTeXML doesn't officially seem to support installation via homebrew and the available package has some issues: Homebrew/homebrew-core#22903 . Especially it is missing the dependency to Imagemagick and therefore after installation it is not possible to convert LaTeX files with images.
But I managed to install LaTeXML using homebrew with Imagemagick and want to document this here. Maybe this is helpful for someone or even can be added to the official documentation:

1. Install LaTeXML via homebrew

$ brew install latexml

2. Download the lastest version of ImageMagick (the formula for Imagemagick from homebrew doesn't work for LaTeXML)

$ wget https://www.imagemagick.org/download/ImageMagick.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf ImageMagick.tar.gz
$ cd ImageMagick

3. Build and compile ImageMagick from source

$ ./configure --with-perl=/usr/bin/perl
$ make
$ make install
$ make clean

4. Open a new terminal and check if you can use the perl package

$ /usr/bin/perl -le 'use Image::Magick; print Image::Magick->QuantumDepth'
16

After doing this the latexmlpost command should find the Image::Magick perl module and be able to convert images.

[matteosecli]

Hi @asmaier, I'm able to install and use LaTeXML with Homebrew (on High Sierra 10.13.2) via:

$ brew install imagemagick --with-perl
$ brew install cpanm
$ cpanm Archive::Zip DB_File File::Which Getopt::Long Image::Size IO::String JSON::XS LWP MIME::Base64 Parse::RecDescent Pod::Parser Text::Unidecode Test::More URI XML::LibXML XML::LibXSLT UUID::Tiny
$ brew install latexml --HEAD

which installs the latest GitHub version with all the required and optional dependencies.

I agree, anyway, that the formula should be updated and that a mention in the documentation would be nice! 😉

[asmaier]

@matteosecli Nice work. Your solution seems to work, because the HEAD version of latexml on github has fixed the shebang in the perl scripts from #!/usr/bin/perl -w to #!/usr/bin/env perl already. So the next release of LaTeXML will work better with perl installed via homebrew.

[dginev]

Excellent, thank you for all the information!

[matteosecli]

@asmaier I'll try to figure out how to fiddle around with the current LaTeXML Homebrew formula to include these fixes, since it appears from your bug report Homebrew/homebrew-core#22903 that they only want pull requests.

[asmaier]

I had a weird problem. The installation of the HEAD version of LaTeXML following the steps of @matteosecli failed on my machine. The two perl modules XML::LibXML XML::LibXSLT couldn't be build and installed. It turned out, that I had to outcomment the following line from my .bash_profile file:

# export PATH="/Users/andi/anaconda/bin:$PATH"

So somehow my version of Anaconda (https://www.anaconda.com/download/#macos) interfered with the build process of the Perl modules XML::LibXML XML::LibXSLT. Just in case you encounter similar problems, have a look at your .bash_profile.

[dginev]

... could you give us a list of files inside that /bin directory? Any chance there is some custom perl or libxml bundled in it?

[matteosecli]

@asmaier I've sent a PR to the Homebrew folks with an updated recipe for LaTeXML. It should solve many of the issues here, including your problems with the XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT modules; the Homebrewed LaTeXML + all the necessary modules should live in its own folder and will use Homebrew's Perl, so there are less chances of interferences.

I've tested the recipe in a clean High Sierra install and it seems to work; could you please give it a try?

Btw I've tried to track down all the non-core Perl modules (and their dependencies) that LaTeXML depends on, but there are chances I've missed some of them. If you get errors about missing modules let me know! 😉

---

Edit:
@asmaier I apologize, if you are on Sierra the new recipe in the PR won't work. If you are still willing to try it, I've fixed it here; now it should work!

[asmaier]

@dginev Don't worry too much about the problem with Anaconda. It turned out that my version of Anaconda was very old. I decided to simply delete it. And it seems to be a known problem, that Anaconda is often interfering with Homebrew, see https://hashrocket.com/blog/posts/keep-anaconda-from-constricting-your-homebrew-installs . So this is not a problem unique to LaTeXML.

[asmaier]

@matteosecli I did install your new homebrew formula with

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matteosecli/homebrew-core/patch-1/Formula/latexml.rb

on Mac OS X 10.12.6 and it worked flawlessly. Imagemagick was installed and I was able to convert my latex document with images included. Thank you very much for this new homebrew formula for LaTeXML!