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System Requirements

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Sharpie edited this page Jan 27, 2012 · 4 revisions

A place to list the TeX programs and packages required by tikzDevice, will eventually be added to the installation section of the vignette.

For Users

MikTeX

  • To be written

TeX Live

  • To be written

Debian Packages

  • texlive
  • texlive-xetex (For UTF8 support via XeLaTeX)
  • texinfo
  • texlive-pictures
  • texlive-fonts-extra
  • texlive-latex-extra

Other Notes

It appears that the LaTeX preview package must be at version 11.86 or higher to properly work with xetex. This in turn requires UNIX/Linux users to instal TeXLive 2010 or newer. Debian/Ubuntu users may be stuck with TeXLive 2009 if they install the above packages using apt and get bad output from standAlone figures.

For Developers

Info for those interested in using and modifying development versions of the tikzDevice. Development versions of the tikzDevice cloned from a git repository do not contain pre-built NAMESPACE, vignette, or Rd files and thus cannot be installed directly via R CMD INSTALL. A Makefile is provided that can help build, install and test the package. Run make in the package directory to see a list of development tasks. GNU Make may be required. In addition, the following items should be installed:

R Packages

  • roxygen2 is required in order to build tikzDevice NAMESPACE and documentation files. make install will fail without it.

  • testthat >= 0.6 is required in order to run the tikzDevice testsuite. make test will fail without it.

Other Software

  • GhostScript is required to combine image PDF files produced by the testsuite. It is also required to allow ImageMagick to analyze PDF files.

  • ImageMagick is required in order for the package testsuite to perform visual regression checks. These checks will be skipped if the compare utility is not found.

Development on Windows

The tikzDevice Makefile and testsuite require a certain number of UNIX tools in order to function. Here are some packages that can help provide the required environment on Windows.

  • Rtools is maintained by the R developers and includes a number of components required for package development on Windows. Some components that are of interest to tikzDevice development are:

    • The MinGW compilers for compiling the C code included in the package.
    • Standard UNIX utilities such as make and sed which are required by the package Makefile.

  • MsysGit provides git which is required in order to obtain development versions of tikzDevice code. This package also provides Git Bash which is an excellent Bash shell for Windows. The package testsuite requires bash to be available.

  • ImageMagick Windows Binaries

  • GhostScript Windows Binaries. NOTE: it appears that the ImageMagick Windows binaries will only look for 32-bit GhostScript binaries (last verified April 2011).

  • Rapid Environment Editor. Making sure all the tools and binaries end up on the Windows PATH is a pain. This is because the Windows Control Panel is not that helpful when it comes to editing environment variables. The Rapid Environment Editor is a very neat freeware tool that takes the pain out of this task.

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