cannot show the svg but the pure text link

[shelper]

did i miss anything ?
many thanks!

[yangsheng6810]

This seems an empty SVG. Could you type a few more characters in the math area to see if it updates correctly?

If that does not work, could you elaborate what's your platform, Emacs version, mathjax-node-cli version? And what's your configuration.

[shelper]

windows 10, emacs 27.1, with RSVG support, mathjax-node-cli @1.0.1,
configuration is as simple as your suggestion, but i have mathjax-node-cli installed in my develop folder as below:

(use-package org-latex-impatient
  :defer t
  :hook (org-mode . org-latex-impatient-mode)
  :init
  (setq org-latex-impatient-tex2svg-bin "~/Develop/node_modules/mathjax-node-cli/bin/tex2svg") ; first location
  (setq org-latex-impatient-tex2svg-bin "~/Develop/node_modules/.bin/tex2svg")  ; second location
)

i found i have two locations has this tex2svg. if i use the first location, i got error:
Error running timer ‘org-latex-impatient-start’: (error "Variable org-latex-impatient-tex2svg-bin is not set correctly")
if i use second location, i got the above output of empty SVG

[yangsheng6810]

Could you try invoking tex2svg directly? E.g.

~/node_modules/mathjax-node-cli/bin/tex2svg "\frac{x}{x^4}" > 1.svg

And open 1.svg to see if tex2svg works by itself?

[shelper]

since i am under windows, i have to run something like this:
node tex2svg "\frac{x}{x^4}" > 1.svg , and it worked

i also tried to run the tex2svg.cmd without node as a prefix and it also worked
tex2svg.cmd "\frac{x}{x^4}" > 1.svg

[yangsheng6810]

I am not familiar with how Emacs calls external processes on Windows. Could you try setting org-latex-impatient-tex2svg-bin to the cmd file you tried? Like (setq org-latex-impatient-tex2svg-bin "~/Develop/node_modules/mathjax-node-cli/bin/tex2svg.cmd") if that is where the file is located.

[shelper]

i did try that , and that is how i saw the popup with that empty svg...

anyway, thanks for the help!

[yangsheng6810]

I suspect it may have something to do with how make-process is handled in Windows. Unfortunately, I do not really have much experience of running Emacs in Windows, and there is not much I can help.

BTW, did you try removing the tests with executable-find, and see if your first location works?

[shelper]

executable-find finds the bin file, and the bin file executes and creates svg correctly under CMD ...

nevermind, i will try to debug little bit if i have time, thanks!

[exilsteira]

I was able to solve similar issues on Windows 10.

1. In org-latex-impatient-start, I removed the linebreaks when joining org-latex-impatient-user-latex-definitions. I did this because I wasn't able to handle multiline arguments to tex2svg.
2. In org-latex-impatient-start, I needed to replace all carets with four (!) carets using (setq tex-string (s-replace-all '(("^" . "^^^^")) tex-string)). Carets are used in Windows to mask the following characters.
3. In org-latex-impatient--add-color, I replaced color with org-latex-impatient-border-color since the color value returned by (face-foreground 'default) was not recognized by my MiKTeX installation.
4. Since I didn't install node, I needed to write a batch script. Within this script, I first create a pdf using pdflatex, then converting it to svg with dvisvgm which is part of my MiKTeX installation. It is far from being perfect, but it fits my basic needs.

[dian-yu-luo]

after two years, windows still have this problem

[yangsheng6810]

Unfortunately, there is not much that I can do. I am not familiar with programming on Windows, and the solution by @exilsteira suggests some non-trivial steps, e.g. carets for escaping and MiKTeX setup. My impression is that make-process might cause further trouble on Windows.

On the other hand, maybe it is a good idea to try Emacs in WSL2 (WSL1 should also be fine, but I/O for small files sucks). It is much faster, reliable, and less problematic than a Windows build. I am running org-latex-impatient on Emacs in WSL2 with no issue.