Package: tex4ht
Version: 20070717-2
Severity: normal
(Presumably version 20070904-1 has the same issue: at least, it doesn't
Recommends or Suggests dvipng, and I'd guess that its use of dvipng is
essentially unchanged, but haven't tested.)
After ‘apt-get install tex4ht’ and reading through the manual, I run htlatex
foo.tex, only to find that tex4ht's default installation/settings produces an
HTML file with references to non-existent .png files if dvipng isn't installed.
I've since discovered that dvipng is mentioned in tex4ht's Description field,
but it doesn't explicitly say that using dvipng requires installing a separate
package, and in any case apt-get doesn't parse the Description field.
So tex4ht should have dvipng in its Suggests or Recommends fields.
Excerpt from debian-policy for your convenience of deciding between the two:
`Recommends'
This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.
The `Recommends' field should list packages that would be found
together with this one in all but unusual installations.
`Suggests'
This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with
one or more others. Using this field tells the packaging system
and the user that the listed packages are related to this one and
can perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this one
without them is perfectly reasonable.
I suggest that Recommends is the appropriate choice, though this may depend on
what proportion of installations of tex4ht you expect to involve calls to
dvipng. E.g. if you think that many people never process documents containing
mathematical equations, or if you change the default to use mathml rather than
dvipng, then you might use Suggests rather than Recommends.
(TeX/LaTeX/tex4ht's handling of equations is often cited among the 1-3 main
reasons for using them, so I would guess that most users of / documents
intended for tex4ht would use equations. Tex4ht's MathML output doesn't come
out right for me in either iceweasel or konqueror, which makes me think that
"all but unusual" tex4ht users will continue to use the default of using
bitmaps and in particular dvipng for the moment. So it appears to me that
Recommends is the right choice.)
pjrm.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages tex4ht depends on:
ii libc6 2.6.1-1+b1 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libkpathsea4 2007-14 TeX Live: path search library for
ii tetex-bin 2007-12 TeX Live: teTeX transitional packa
ii tex4ht-common 20070717-2 LaTeX and TeX for Hypertext (HTML)
ii texlive-base-bin 2007-14 TeX Live: Essential binaries
tex4ht recommends no packages.
-- no debconf information
