XWiki hangs on Formula Macro with MiKTeX in Path

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#1

I’m running XWiki 10.2 on apache-tomcat-8.5.24/Windows. Since I installed MiKTeX on the same machine, all pages that contain formula macros hang. I see a bunch of miktex-pdftex.exe processes, that block directories below

apache-tomcat-8.5.24\work\Catalina\localhost\xwiki\xwiki-temp\formulae

When I remove MiKTeX from the path, the formula macro works again.

I’d like to know how the formulas are generated when MiKTeX is not installed, and how I could use MiKTeX to generate maybe nicer formulas.

#2

Hi Guido, I don’t have the answer to your question but I can point you to http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Formula%20Macro#HTechnicalinformation

My guess would that the default method is influenced in some ways by whether miktex is installed or not. I guess one way to know more would be to follow the source code: https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/tree/master/xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-formula/xwiki-platform-formula-macro

Unless someone else knows the answer :wink:

#3

Actually just checked quickly the source and I can see that the “native” method uses the “latex” executable on the machine, see https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/blob/109207e1cb4efbcaef079954d594cb7bdbb0c94e/xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-formula/xwiki-platform-formula-renderer/src/main/java/org/xwiki/formula/internal/NativeFormulaRenderer.java#L113

#4

Hi Vincent, the option macro.formula.renderer is not listed in xwiki.properties, so I thought the technical doc be outdated. I’ll give this option a try. Thanks, Guido