]> Top Prerequisites The GD Graphics Draw library, libgdThe drawing library ‘libgd’ is necessary, and is downloadable athttp://www.boutell.com/gd, and there are binary packages formost operating systems from their respective distributors. In anycase, the latest version of the library installs using ‘autoconf’so it should not be difficult for you to install it from source, andthen proceed with installing dvipng. The path-searching library kpathseaKpathsea is most likely included in your La&tex; installation, but itmay happen that ./configure does not find it; see below. If you do nothave it, download it from http://www.ctan.org and compile it.I have no experience with this, so I cannot help much here. FreeType 2 and/or T1libWhile not strictly necessary, you may want to have FreeType 2 or T1libavailable. Their presence will enable direct support for PostScriptfonts in dvipng, rather than using ‘gsftopk’ for rendering thefonts. If you have PostScript versons of Computer Modern installed,there will be no need to generate bitmapped variants on disk ofthese. Then, you can render images at different (and unusual)resolutions without cluttering the disk with lots of bitmapped fonts.If both FreeType 2 and T1lib are present, FreeType will be internallypreferred by dvipng, but T1lib can be chosen at runtime. libpng and libzTo be able to compress and write PNG files to disk, dvipng (or reallylibgd) uses libpng which in turn uses libz. These should be available onany modern system, if not, download them and install them. The texinfo packageThis is needed for building the documentation. Configure The first step is to configure the source code, telling it where various files will be. To do so, run ./configure options (Note: if you have fetched dvipng from CVS rather than a regular release, you will have to first generate ./configure by running autoconf 2.53 or later in the preview directory.) On many machines, you will not need to specify any options, but if configure cannot determine something on its own, you'll need to help it out. For a list of the options type ./configure --help On some machines, the libraries will be installed in directories that are not in the linker's search path. This will generate an error when running ./configure, indicating that it cannot find libgd or libkpathsea (most likely). You then need to specify the path to the respective library's object files. They are typically called e.g., libgd.a or libgd.so. If they are located in e.g., /sw/local/lib, do ./configure LDFLAGS=-L/sw/local/lib If the library is available as a shared object file (.so), the runtime linker may also need to be told where to find the library, then use ./configure LDFLAGS='-L/sw/local/lib -R/sw/local/lib' When either of these is necessary, it is likely that the C header files are also installed in directories that are not in the C preprocessor's search path. This will also generate an error when running ./configure, indicating that it cannot find e.g., gd.h or kpathsea.h (most likely). You then need to specify the path to the respective library's C header files. If they are located in e.g., /sw/local/include, do ./configure CPPFLAGS=-I/sw/local/include On my SUN Solaris workstation, I had to combine this into ./configure CPPFLAGS='-I/sw/local/include -I/sw/tex/teTeX/1.0/include'\ LDFLAGS='-L/sw/local/lib -R/sw/local/lib -L/sw/tex/teTeX/1.0/lib/' where the backslash denotes a continuation of the line. Build/install Once configure has been run, simply enter make at the prompt to compile the C code, and build the documentation files. To install the files into the locations chosen earlier, type make install You may need special privileges to install, e.g., if you are installing into system directories. Installation outside the texmf tree In some cases, a dvipng binary installed outside the texmf tree will not be able to find virtual fonts, or the PostScript font maps (normally used by dvips). This may be because only $SELFAUTOLOC, $SELFAUTODIR, and $SELFAUTOPARENT are used in the texmf tree configuration file ‘texmf.cnf’. If so, give the switch ‘--enable-selfauto-set’ to ‘./configure’. This will make dvipng adjust these three internally so that kpathsea thinks that dvipng is installed in the texmf tree. Installation for non-privileged users Often people without system administration privileges want to install software for their private use. In that case you need to specify more options to the configure script, usually this is done by using the ‘--prefix’ option to the configure script, and let it point to the personal home directory. In that way, resulting binaries will be installed under the bin subdirectory of your home directory, manual pages under man and so on. That way, it is reasonably easy to maintain a bunch of additional packages, since the prefix argument is supported by most configure scripts. You'll have to add something like /home/myself/bin to your PATH shell variable, if it isn't there already, and similarly set the INFOPATH variable to be able to access the documentation.