error message when previewing latex snippet in .org file

Question

I am a brand new emacs user and I want to be able to view snippets of LaTeX in my .org file.

My OS is Ubuntu 16.04, I have installed texlive-full, and I have installed AucTex and org using the Emacs package manager.

I have been trying to follow the first example in this guide:

latex preview example

I have put in my .emacs file the single line

(setq org-latex-create-formula-image-program 'imagemagick)

I have the imagemagick package installed in Ubuntu.

Yet when I try to see the first example by pressing C-c C-x C-l, I get this error message:

org-compile-file: File "/tmp/orgtex32228nYH.pdf" wasn't produced.  Please adjust 'imagemagick' part of `org-preview-latex-process-alist'.

When I press C-h v I can inspect the variable, but I have no idea what to change...

Looking in /tmp there is no corresponding .log file, only a .tex file, which doesn't reveal any error.

Can anybody please help me?

Answer 1

I recently struggled with this same problem, after installing texlive-full on Linux Mint. I followed advice starting from this post and indeed found I needed to install an additional package: ulem.sty. Unfortunately you say you cannot find the .log file, but if you can find where the .log file is, I suspect you will find you need additional packages which were not included in texlive-full.

Answer 2

I solved the problem that way :

1. Edit /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml
2. Change the line <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" /> to: <policy domain="coder" rights="read|write" pattern="PDF" />

Answer 3

I also faced the same problem. In my case, it was caused by the wrong setting of :latex-compiler in imagemagick part of org-preview-latex-process-alist: the original value was

("pdflatex -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory %o %f")

but I would like use

("lualatex -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory %o %f")

instead.

As I do not know much about lisp, I simply followed https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41568410/configure-org-mode-to-use-lualatex

Although this patch is for lualatex users like me (and not the best or reasonable way), your problem could be solved in a similar manner. You might define new function (e.g. new-imagemagick) with proper :latex-compiler command, add it to org-preview-latex-process-alist and call it rather than imagemagick. You can change directly the part of "pdf latex -interation ....") according to your prefer latex command.

Answer 4

I found the logs for this in my /tmp/ directory, but the way I was able to debug this was by running the convert command found in org-preview-latex-process-alist myself.

I got an error saying

convert: attempt to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy 
 `gs' @ error/delegate.c/ExternalDelegateCommand/378.

If this is the case for you, you can edit the policy found in /etc/ImageMagick-<version>/policy.xml. Change the rights for the gs pattern from none to all.

You can check the version of ImageMagick that Emacs uses by running

convert --version

Answer 5

I am on a Windows machine and the error was caused by the fact that the proper command in imagemagick to convert is not only convert anymore, but it is now magick convert. Changing that in the org-preview-latex-process-alist variable solved the problem for me.

That means the imagemagicksection of the var should be as follows

(imagemagick :programs
             ("latex" "convert")
             :description "pdf > png" :message "you need to install the programs: latex and imagemagick." :image-input-type "pdf" :image-output-type "png" :image-size-adjust
             (1.0 . 1.0)
             :latex-compilerpiler
             ("pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode -output-directory %o %f")
             :image-converter ;;on windows we need "magick" command prefix
             ("magick convert -density %D -trim -antialias %f -quality 100 %O"))