Asy fixes

[mdoob]

This pull request addresses the missing asymptote Figures 9.9 and 9.11 in Section 9.3. The added svg files will now display properly. The Riemann surface actually uses WebGL, so maybe it is slightly out of place. The contour plot is a bit more of a problem. I generated it myself rather that using mbx,
so it does show what PreTeXt can do, albeit not using the standard route. If this makes you uncomfortable, I included that file with a separate commit so that it is easy to abandon. Now that it has my attention, I'll use the next few days to see how dvisvgm might be adapted.

Cheers,
Michael

[sean-fitzpatrick]

I know this is for the sample article but have you tried running mbx with svg output over some 3D graphs? I could try running it over the 3D graphs in APEX to see how that comes out. Overkill maybe, but John seemed to think it should work fine if everything is reasonably up to date

[mdoob]

Here is my "standard" MWE for 3d tests:

import three;
size(6cm);
size3(2cm,1cm,1cm);
draw(unitbox);

If you use this with asy -f svg, you get an svg file which contains the line
<image x='56.413252' y='53.798257' width='172' height='159.980075' xlink:href='cube_0.png'/>
and this works fine if the file cube_0.png, created by asy, is in the same directory. Since mbx doesn't put the png file(s) in place, the svg fails to display properly.

A propos to this PR, asymptote-contour.svg does the same thing, and that is precisely why I rolled my own to make the svg file that is included in the c245f5d commit.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Doesn't mbx have a subroutine that checks for the png files and copies them if they're there?

for diagram in diagrams:
        asydiagram = diagram[0]
        # can condition processing on diagram[1]
        # which is a string: '2D' or '3D'
        if outformat == 'source':
            shutil.copy2(asydiagram, dest_dir)
        elif outformat == 'html':
            filebase, _ = os.path.splitext(asydiagram)
            asyout = "{}.{}".format(filebase, outformat)
            asysvg = "{}.svg".format(filebase)
            asypng = "{}_*.png".format(filebase)
            asy_cmd = [asy_executable, '-outformat', outformat, asydiagram]
            _verbose("converting {} to {}".format(asydiagram, asyout))
            _debug("asymptote conversion {}".format(asy_cmd))
            subprocess.call(asy_cmd, stdout=devnull, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
            if os.path.exists(asyout) == True:
                shutil.copy2(asyout, dest_dir)
            else:
                shutil.copy2(asysvg, dest_dir)
                # Sometimes Asymptotes SVGs include multiple PNGs for colored regions
                for f in glob.glob(asypng):
                    shutil.copy2(f, dest_dir)
        else:
            filebase, _ = os.path.splitext(asydiagram)
            asyout = "{}.{}".format(filebase, outformat)
            asypng = "{}_*.png".format(filebase)
            asy_cmd = [asy_executable, '-noprc', '-offscreen', '-batchMask', '-outformat', outformat, asydiagram]
            _verbose("converting {} to {}".format(asydiagram, asyout))
            _debug("asymptote conversion {}".format(asy_cmd))
            subprocess.call(asy_cmd, stdout=devnull, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
            shutil.copy2(asyout, dest_dir)
            # Sometimes Asymptotes SVGs include multiple PNGs for colored regions
            for f in glob.glob(asypng):
                shutil.copy2(f, dest_dir)

Maybe there's a bug in this part of the code?

[rbeezer]

My recollection is that the SVG created by asy makes assumptions about the location of the PNG file that are inaccurate when the two files live in a directory *below* the directory with the page including the image. Do the mbx drill, put everything in place, then use your browser to open *just* the SVG image. At least that is how I remember it before I disappear to grade final exams. mbx definitely looks for a PNG and tries to place it correctly.

…

On 5/12/20 11:31 AM, sean-fitzpatrick wrote: Doesn't |mbx| have a subroutine that checks for the png files and copies them if they're there? |for diagram in diagrams: asydiagram = diagram[0] # can condition processing on diagram[1] # which is a string: '2D' or '3D' if outformat == 'source': shutil.copy2(asydiagram, dest_dir) elif outformat == 'html': filebase, _ = os.path.splitext(asydiagram) asyout = "{}.{}".format(filebase, outformat) asysvg = "{}.svg".format(filebase) asypng = "{}_*.png".format(filebase) asy_cmd = [asy_executable, '-outformat', outformat, asydiagram] _verbose("converting {} to {}".format(asydiagram, asyout)) _debug("asymptote conversion {}".format(asy_cmd)) subprocess.call(asy_cmd, stdout=devnull, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT) if os.path.exists(asyout) == True: shutil.copy2(asyout, dest_dir) else: shutil.copy2(asysvg, dest_dir) # Sometimes Asymptotes SVGs include multiple PNGs for colored regions for f in glob.glob(asypng): shutil.copy2(f, dest_dir) else: filebase, _ = os.path.splitext(asydiagram) asyout = "{}.{}".format(filebase, outformat) asypng = "{}_*.png".format(filebase) asy_cmd = [asy_executable, '-noprc', '-offscreen', '-batchMask', '-outformat', outformat, asydiagram] _verbose("converting {} to {}".format(asydiagram, asyout)) _debug("asymptote conversion {}".format(asy_cmd)) subprocess.call(asy_cmd, stdout=devnull, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT) shutil.copy2(asyout, dest_dir) # Sometimes Asymptotes SVGs include multiple PNGs for colored regions for f in glob.glob(asypng): shutil.copy2(f, dest_dir) | Maybe there's a bug in this part of the code? — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1275 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAOLM4RNPM7QY6D4UBRXVXDRRGIZHANCNFSM4M6MIWFA>.

[mdoob]

I made a fresh copy of the mathbook repo and reran xsltproc on the sample-article followed by mbx using asy with the -f html option.

First of all, using version 2.65 of asymptote will now clear up the problem with the Riemann surface. It looks beautiful.

Next, I found a (start for a) solution to the problem with the contour plot. It is in the graphics.html file generated by xsltproc. The diff between to original and new graphics.html files is given below, but in summary:

<object data="images/asymptote-contour.html" id="asymptote-contour" width="600" height="600">

is changed to

<object data="images/asymptote-contour.svg" id="asymptote-contour" width="600" height="600">

4c4
< <!--*    on 2020-05-13T12:23:52-05:00    *-->
---
> <!--*    on 2020-05-13T09:32:40-05:00    *-->
351c351
< <figure class="figure figure-like" id="figure-asymptote-contour-plot"><div class="image-box" style="width: 100%; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 0%;"><object data="images/asymptote-contour.html" id="asymptote-contour" width="600" height="600"><img src="images/asymptote-contour.svg" style="width: 100%; height: auto;" alt=""></object></div>
---
> <figure class="figure figure-like" id="figure-asymptote-contour-plot"><div class="image-box" style="width: 100%; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 0%;"><object data="images/asymptote-contour.svg" id="asymptote-contour" width="600" height="600"><img src="images/asymptote-contour.svg" style="width: 100%; height: auto;" alt=""></object></div>

I can see where these lines get generated in the mathbook-html.xsl file, but I'm hesitant to add my own fix since I'm not sure what other things would be affected.

[mdoob]

And furthermore, the source for asymptote-contour.asy is

import graph;
import palette;

size(10cm,10cm,IgnoreAspect);

real f(real x, real y) {
return 0.9*pow10(2*sin(x/5+2*y^0.25)) + 0.1*(1+cos(10*log(y)));
}

scale(Linear,Log,Log);

pen[] Palette=BWRainbow();

bounds range=image(f,Automatic,(0,1),(100,100),nx=200,Palette);

xaxis("$x$",BottomTop,LeftTicks,above=true);
yaxis("$y$",LeftRight,RightTicks,above=true);

palette("$f(x,y)$",range,(0,200),(100,250),Top,Palette,
PaletteTicks(ptick=linewidth(0.5*linewidth())));

Question: import graph is not import graph3, so why the choice of html output in extract-asymptote?.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

I'm going to try running mbx with svg output on APEX Calculus. (All asymptote graphs are 3D graphs there though.)
As I understand the mbx script, it:

• extracts each <asymptote> component in the source and writes it to a file in a temp directory.
• inserts the context of the <macros> section at the top of your PreTeXt file at the top of each file.
• runs asy with the specified options on every file in that temp directory
• copies the output to your images folder.

So I think (but could be wrong) that it's the asy binary that's deciding whether or not a given Asymptote figure should be rendered as html or svg when you run it with the -f html option.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

So what I learned today is that version 2.65 (in fact, I think 2.62 will do) is good enough to run mbx -c asy -f html and get a successful run through APEX, with all files outputting to HTML, except for a small number of non-3D asymptote (yes, it turns out these do exist in APEX) that get converted to SVG automagically.

But if I run mbx -c asy -f svg I run into trouble: we need version 2.66 of Asymptote, and dvisvgm at version 2.9.1 to get direct svg output from 3D Asymptote.

I spent awhile tonight fighting to get asymptote to compile from the github source. Every time I think I've got it, it turns out I was missing some library and it doesn't work as expected. I'll try again tomorrow!

[mdoob]

Sean --

Could you try the with same experiment the asymptote-contour.asy attached?

asymptote-contour.asy.txt

[rbeezer]

So what I learned today is that version 2.65 (in fact, I think 2.62 will do) is good enough to run mbx -c asy -f html and get a successful run through APEX, with all files outputting to HTML, except for a small number of non-3D asymptote (yes, it turns out these do exist in APEX) that get converted to SVG automagically.

mathbook-html.xsl generates HTML output of the PTX that will embed the Asymptote image as an object whose @data is the HTML file. Then a fallback is contained in the object which uses an img/@src that is an SVG file.

So, is mbx -c asy -f html "good enough" to create all the Asymptote images for HTML output? We may need to do something else for an author who wants all 2D versions of every diagram/figure, even if they are described as 3D.

The mbx script does nothing more for mbx -c asy -f html than call asy with -outformat html. -f pdf and -f svg are run by the same stanza, so perhaps these need to be split and adapted separately.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Yes, I think for most use cases, we want to run with HTML output -- we get SVGs for free on figures where there is no 3D content.
But maybe you need SVG for ePub? And Alex likes to have each image available in multiple formats.

We might need different commands for PDF and SVG, because we have to pass different options. For PDF we probably want -noprc. For SVG the default image quality isn't great, so we want something like -render=4.

I've been able to get 2.66 to compile from source but it isn't working quite right. In particular, the -offscreen option isn't working for me. I think this is an Ubuntu thing (in particular, the Mesa graphics libraries.)

[rbeezer]

@mdoob - what "extra" did you need to do to make the "contour" plot? Just a newer version of asy, or something else?

It appears to have the two "gradient" images embedded directly as base64 (one PNG, one JPG) within the single SVG file, where formerly the SVG "linked in" two external PNG files. The new scheme would be a big improvement.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Here is my output running Asymptote 2.66 on asymptote-contour.svg:
contour plot

This was on my laptop where I'm running Ubuntu 18.04. I'm able to compile Asymptote just fine here. But I know John was asking about having dvisvgm at version 2.9.1. That's not possible on 18.04 because it requires a newer version of libc6.

I'll try on my desktop in a bit.

[mdoob]

Hi Sean -- Did you get the same result with -f svg and -f html? My problem was with the former working and the latter not.

…

------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael Doob Telephone: (204) 474-9796 Senior Scholar Department of Mathematics email: Michael.Doob@UManitoba.ca University of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3T 2N2 ------------------------------------------------------------------

________________________________________ From: sean-fitzpatrick <notifications@github.com> Sent: May 14, 2020 2:13:37 PM To: rbeezer/mathbook Cc: Michael Doob; Mention Subject: Re: [rbeezer/mathbook] Asy fixes (#1275) Caution: This message was sent from outside the University of Manitoba. Here is my output running Asymptote 2.66 on asymptote-contour.svg: contour plot<http://www.cs.uleth.ca/~fitzpat/asymptote-contour.svg> This was on my laptop where I'm running Ubuntu 18.04. I'm able to compile Asymptote just fine here. But I know John was asking about having dvisvgm at version 2.9.1. That's not possible on 18.04 because it requires a newer version of libc6. I'll try on my desktop in a bit. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#1275 (comment)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAVJL7VLF4APSIUFIV7IUYTRRQ7GDANCNFSM4M6MIWFA>.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Yes, I got the same result. Running asy asymptote-contour.asy -f html gives me the terminal output:

warning [htmltosvg]: html output requested for 2D picture; generating svg image instead...

and I get what appears to be the same SVG as before.

[mdoob]

@mdoob - what "extra" did you need to do to make the "contour" plot? Just a newer version of asy, or something else?

It appears to have the two "gradient" images embedded directly as base64 (one PNG, one JPG) within the single SVG file, where formerly the SVG "linked in" two external PNG files. The new scheme would be a big improvement.

Here is where I see us now: when running mbx with -f html, the svg file and png files that
appear in the images directory are correct, in the sense that they can display properly.
The problem is that the html as generated is unable to to do this (the diff between the working and failing ones is in a previous comment (about 10 back). One extension is changed from html to svg.

Just to repeat:
<object data="images/asymptote-contour.html" id="asymptote-contour" width="600" height="600">
needs to be changed to
<object data="images/asymptote-contour.svg" id="asymptote-contour" width="600" height="600">
in order for the figure to appear.

I also tried adding the attribute dimension="2", but it made no difference.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

In the HTML for APEX Calculus (most recently generated about a week ago) each Asymptote figure appears like the following (this is the very first Asymptote figure in the book):

<figure class="figure figure-like" id="fig_cross1">
  <div class="image-box" style="width: 47%; margin-left: 26.5%; margin-right: 26.5%;">
    <object data="images/img_cross1.html" id="img_cross1" width="282" height="282">
      <img src="images/img_cross1.svg" style="width: 100%; height: auto;" alt="">
    </object>
  </div>

As I understand it, this looks first for the HTML, and if that is missing, it uses SVG.
I'm pretty sure my HTML source was similar last fall before Asymptote 2.62 came out. Back then I was running mbx to produce PDF output for each figure and then using a shell script (courtesy of Michael) to convert all the PDF to SVG. And images showed up.

But yes -- I can confirm what Michael is saying: if I remove the HTML file (or rather, rename it), the SVG is not being used as fallback. I just get an empty image.

But if I right-click and select view image, the SVG is there.

[rbeezer]

I'm confused by the diff @mdoob posted above. First, the timestamps look out-of-order (older one is leaving). And the *.html version is what should be currently produced.

The checks on the import have no effect on files like graphics.html.

When I build with this PR applied everyting looks fine - in other words, SVG fallbacks are working.

[mdoob]

I'm confused by the diff @mdoob posted above. First, the timestamps look out-of-order (older one is leaving). And the *.html version is what should be currently produced.

It took me some time to find a single change that would put everything right. I saved the
corrected graphics.html and reran xsltproc to be sure that diff would report exactly one
significant change, and so the file that works is older than the one that doesn't.

The checks on the import have no effect on files like graphics.html.

When I build with this PR applied everyting looks fine - in other words, SVG fallbacks are working.

Yes, the svg and png files show up properly in the images directory. The problem is that the graphics.html files doesn't read them. I think that asy and mbx are doing the right thing. It appears that during the extraction of the asymptote code from the xml file, the source is being interpreted as a 3D figure.

[mdoob]

To add a little more fuel to the fire:
running mbx -vv -f html -c asy -d ./images sample-article.xml yields

MBX: #####################################################
MBX: converting asymptote-lever.asy to asymptote-lever.html
MBX-DEBUG: asymptote conversion ['asy', '-outformat', 'html', 'asymptote-lever.asy']
MBX: converting asymptote-contour.asy to asymptote-contour.html
MBX-DEBUG: asymptote conversion ['asy', '-outformat', 'html', 'asymptote-contour.asy']
MBX: converting asymptote-lever-integral.asy to asymptote-lever-integral.html
MBX-DEBUG: asymptote conversion ['asy', '-outformat', 'html', 'asymptote-lever-integral.asy']
MBX: converting asymptote-surface.asy to asymptote-surface.html
MBX-DEBUG: asymptote conversion ['asy', '-outformat', 'html', 'asymptote-surface.asy']
MBX: converting asymptote-workcone.asy to asymptote-workcone.html
MBX-DEBUG: asymptote conversion ['asy', '-outformat', 'html', 'asymptote-workcone.asy']
MBX: converting asymptote-lever-solo.asy to asymptote-lever-solo.html
MBX-DEBUG: asymptote conversion ['asy', '-outformat', 'html', 'asymptote-lever-solo.asy']

So every call to asy uses -f html. Now mbx has received '2D' or '3D' to indicate the dimension of the figure. Shouldn't that be used at this point?

[sean-fitzpatrick]

It wasn't clear to me if mbx was now receiving that information. But is that even necessary? I think the point is that Asymptote can make that decision. We just run mbx with html as the output type.

Asymptote is going to successfully convert every image. Some will become html, some will become svg.

The mbx script calls asy, then it calls shutil to move the output to the images folder. We just need an if/else for the shutil step: if the html exists, move it. Else, move the svg.

[mdoob]

It wasn't clear to me if mbx was now receiving that information. But is that even necessary? I think the point is that Asymptote can make that decision. We just run mbx with html as the output type.

Asymptote is going to successfully convert every image. Some will become html, some will become svg.

Ok. If that's the plan, let's forget 2D/3D in extract-asymptote.xsl. Just use -f html on everything.

The mbx script calls asy, then it calls shutil to move the output to the images folder. We just need an if/else for the shutil step: if the html exists, move it. Else, move the svg.

Sounds like a plan!

[sean-fitzpatrick]

The main reason I'm trying to figure out svg is that someone might want to force svg format for figures that would otherwise be html. So we want to be able to run mbx -c asy -f svg and have that exit successfully when there are 3D figures present.

It seems like Asymptote 2.66 should support this. Although John mentioned in email that -offscreen isn't supported any more. I need to find out if that's going to be an issue.

[rbeezer]

The checks on the import have no effect on files like graphics.html.

I added the 2D/3D information to extract-asymptote.html when I thought somebody was going to use it in the Python script.

The mbx script calls asy, then it calls shutil to move the output to the images folder. We just need an if/else for the shutil step: if the html exists, move it. Else, move the svg.

I believe this is already there.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Yes, I put it there in that initial pull request to add support for html output from Asymptote. Though I'm not sure if that PR we ever fully merged.

For the various output formats, I think we're at:

PDF: works on all figures.
HTML: works on all figures (but 2D gets converted to svg)
SVG: currently fails on 3D but will work on all figures with next Asymptote release

I'm not sure there's much demand for other formats (EPS?).

We're maybe a year out from being able to do a clean mbx run using default versions in a stable Linux distro. But for those willing to pull in a few programs at higher version numbers we should be there by next week.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

OK, positive result. I am currently enjoying watching a shell script blast through 309 asy files generated from APEX Calculus ptx. All but a few are 3D, and I'm generating SVG.
The render=4 option gives nice output, but annoying if you're doing 300 diagrams: each time one is processed, a window pops up that steals focus. (Typing a message is fun: get in a few keystrokes, window comes, window goes, few more keystrokes, repeat.)

A slight modification of a suggestion from John Bowman does the trick: I'm running:
asy foo.asy -f svg -tex xelatex -render=0

The render=0 option is very experimental according to John. But I got a smooth run. Everything outputs to SVG, with no accompanying PNG files. And the SVG looks good.
About to try this with mbx.

Note however that SVG and PDF will need different command line options, so we will have to tweak the mbx script a bit more -- I think -- to treat these separately.

[rbeezer]

OK, spent a long time reading through all this. Seems there are two things to do:

1. We need to try embed versus img for a fallback SVG in HTML output files where an Asymptote image appears. I'd make a beta for browser testing before merging this.
2. We need a whole new stanza in mbx to support -f svg. And this will depend on very recent releases. But might fix the error Sean got with a small change.

When we are confident about changes, it would help if @sean-fitzpatrick were to write down the best asy command lines (switches) for html/svg, pure-svg, and PDF.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

In the good news/bad news department:
(bad news first)

• mbx is still failing on me when I try to run asy with SVG output and I don't know why. (I tried putting the full path to asy in mbx.cfg with the same result. But I also don't have any other asy version installed.)
• if I run asy -f svg -render=4 asymptote-contour.asy I get two auxilary PNG files. But if I add in the option -tex xelatex I get a single SVG with no added PNG files.

I suspect the reason is that I've got the most recent dvisvgm installed. But I'm not entirely sure. (John could probably tell me but I've sent enough his way this week.)

It's possibly mbx is not working because I'm on older hardware (AMD A10-6800K APU from 2013) with open source graphics drives. John mentioned that the -iconify option, which suppresses the rendering window, doesn't work on some older graphics configurations. Maybe mbx doesn't like that window popping up?

[mdoob]

I made a change to mathbook-html.xsl following Sean's suggestion. Here is the diff

mdoob@Z97N-WIFI:~$ diff  mathbook-html.xsl.*
5784c5784
<         <xsl:element name="embed">
---
>         <xsl:element name="img">

All the figures displayed correctly. I looked at the logs and did get a number of 404s for html files, but later all the svg and png files came in as expected (200 return code).

[rbeezer]

Thanks, Michael. I'll make a beta version soon, so folks can hit it with a variety of browsers. img, object, embed seem to have a checkered history.

[rbeezer]

Beta here:

https://pretextbook.org/beta/2020-05-16-asymptote/graphics.html

Old 2-D Riemann surface. Figure 9.12 is 3D HTML via object. I cannot see 9.12 when viewing locally, I do see it in this hosted version.

If @mdoob and @sean-fitzpatrick both report success here, then I can put it on -dev for wider testing.

[mdoob]

Sean and I went down the local/hosted version problem earlier. To make a long story short,
your browser won't let you load a local html file as a security measure. Running
python3 -m http.server
will let you load the web address localhost:8000 and in this context you can view your files.
You can add a different port number as a command line option.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

The graphics in the sample article all show up for me. The non-interactive 3D image seems like it could be higher quality but I don't think that's a PreTeXt issue.

I get the same results on both Chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu 18.04.

[mdoob]

Looks like the png got loaded instead of the svg. What do your logs tell you?

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Looking at the page source (or using the inspector), I think the embed option is including the SVG source. Then the SVG loads the PNG.

[rbeezer]

Commits here by @mdoob have been repackaged, keeping everything as-is. Thanks very much for the flexibility of a separate commit for the contour plot, which at one point I did consider dropping. Nice use of git. I moved the 3D surface into a subsection with the 3D cone. And added documentation, including keyboard controls from @mdoob on -dev, as an accessibility feature.

I'm going to keep this open. If I got recommened asy command lines (-render, -tex, etc.) I could spruce up the mbx script while tip-toeing around the other refactoring there. Then close this.

Thanks for all the good work on this one. We're getting there.

[mdoob]

This has been a nice improvement (fun, too). My understanding is that with asymptote version 2.66, all the 3d figures compile and display correctly. Right?

[sean-fitzpatrick]

For html (WebGL) output, it seems like simply doing asy -f html foo.asy is sufficient.
We could probably specify the TeX engine to play it safe, in case somebody puts something like an accented character in a label: asy -f html -tex xelatex foo.asy.

I'm not sure if it's necessary to add anything in there for SVG fallback.

For SVG, based on what I pulled from the email thread with John and @mdoob we can use
asy -f svg -tex xelatex -render=4 -iconify foo.asy.

The iconify option is to suppress the rendering window. (Right now in mbx we have -offscreen which John tells me is deprecated and should be avoided.)
We can increase or decrease the integer in -render=4 depending on where we want the tradeoff between image quality and file size. Maybe somebody who has an eye for that sort of thing should test on a few examples?

One interesting thing to note: when I build svg using the line above, I do not get the auxiliary PNG files: everything gets bundled into one svg.

@mdoob with 2.66 we can compile 3D figures directly to SVG, and everything is contained in a single svg. (So we'd be OK with img as well as with embed.) But dependencies need to be up to date as well. I was able to compile 2.66 on Ubuntu 18.04, but I couldn't upgrade dvisvgm because it depended on a newer version of libc6 that was not installable. And with old dvisvgm I get an empty svg.

[rbeezer]

Working on mbx script for Asymptote production. Not Windowized yet. On my system without new stuff, so as to not break much for existing users. Ubuntu 18.04, Asy 2.41, dvisvgm 2.1.3.

Goals for mbx:

• -f pdf will create PDFs for LateX/PDF output. Modulo Windows/pdfcrop problem.
• -f html will create nice WebGL for 3D diagrams, and will automatically make SVG for 2D images. Needs Asy 2.65 minimum.
• -f svg will create 2D versions of all diagrams, necessary for EPUB, or... Needs dvisvgm 2.9.1.

My understanding and tests on old software (which I will document)

• -f pdf works fine, even if quality might be weak. I'm not getting 3D images to convert, though.
  Asy error on both 3D: /usr/share/asymptote/three.asy: 2905.13: Singular matrix

asy -noprc -iconify -batchMask -f pdf asymptote-workcone.asy

• f html just fails since my asy is too old.

asy -f html asymptote-lever.asy

• -f svg works for 2D, with exceptions:
  -tex xelatex results in zero output for any diagram, asy too old or something else?
  Same 2905.13 problem for the two 3D diagrams.

asy -f svg -render=4 -iconify asymptote-lever-solo.asy

[sean-fitzpatrick]

I was able to compile the work cone example using the command you provided. So maybe it's something specific to your version of asymptote? I just pasted the macros from the sample article into a file, along with the asymptote code.

Some experimentation tells me that the option -tex xelatex is sufficient to create a single svg with no png files attached, as long as your version of dvisvgm is recent enough.

[rbeezer]

Thanks. Sounds like we need to choose between backward-compatibility (e.g. -tex fails) and future-features (e.g. -tex makes nice SVGs). I sense @sean-fitzpatrick wants to let people play catch-up with their systems and we go for the new features.

I'm for that, since I do not think there has been much uptake of <asymptote> yet, and the new features will change that. I'll need some testing on newer systems if we go the future route (he says looking at the patient @sean-fitzpatrick).

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Testing your new mbx. One urgent change for asymptote: -offscreen needs to be removed. If you run asy with -offscreen on Windows, it hangs at an error message and mbx can't finish.

[rbeezer]

Right. I've got a "asy-command-line" commit all queued up, which will remove this. But needed to keep that separate for now since I've got too many fingers in the pie. ;-)

…

On 5/20/20 10:07 AM, sean-fitzpatrick wrote: Testing your new mbx. One urgent change for asymptote: |-offscreen| needs to be removed. If you run |asy| with |-offscreen| on Windows, it hangs at an error message and |mbx| can't finish. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1275 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAOLM4QTVPB3AK4MOJ3TDYLRSQE4JANCNFSM4M6MIWFA>.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Looks like for pdf, -noView is the right replacement. mbx is running successfully with
asy -noprc -noView -batchMask -f pdf foo.asy

I'm not entirely sure that batchMask does anything. Maybe @mdoob knows.

[mdoob]

from man asy:

      -batchMask
              Mask fpu exceptions in batch mode [false].

[rbeezer]

With 3bb8833 I'm going to close this now.

Thanks, @mdoob and @sean-fitzpatrick, for all the work on this one.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

I noticed a couple of things in 3bb8833 that need adjusting.
At line 113: if os.path.exists(asyout) == 'True'

This looks like it got copied over from the html block. But you don't want it here. For the html block, this checks to see if an html file was created. If not (because the diagram was 2D) it looks for the SVG instead.

I think you just need to delete this line as well as line 115 (the else statement).

At line 124, I think maybe -iconify works for SVG but not PDF. (@mdoob can you confirm?) When I tried this on Windows I got an empty/corrupted image for the PDF. I noticed that the preconfigured option in my LaTeX editor is noView and this seems to work.

For the asy command starting at line 105, it seems like a good idea to include -tex xelatex as long as asy and dvisvgm are sufficiently recent. (Without this option I don't think dvisvgm is really needed.) Adding this as an option seems to eliminate the extra PNG files in most (if not all) cases.

[mdoob]

Sorry Sean, I'm doing a system install on my home computer and was away.

Exactly what do you want me to try out?

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Hi Michael. Just looking for confirmation that we have reasonable command line options for each file format in the mbx script.

[rbeezer]

In a matter of hours it will be a module `pretext\pretext.py`

…

On 5/21/20 7:37 PM, sean-fitzpatrick wrote: Hi Michael. Just looking for confirmation that we have reasonable command line options for each file format in the |mbx| script. — You are receiving this because you modified the open/close state. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1275 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAOLM4XUISJVRFC3XYGHYQDRSXQNLANCNFSM4M6MIWFA>.