Re: [Matplotlib-users] using TeX backend on windows version of matplotlib?

[Gary R. <gr...@bi...>]

Alan G Isaac wrote:
>> On Thu, 06 Oct 2005, Gary Ruben apparently wrote: 
>>> Your example works fine on my Win2k + MiKTeX setup with Matplotlib 0.83 
> 
> On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Alan G Isaac apparently wrote: 
>> You see the \alpha in his example?? 
>> Alan Isaac 
>> Using Win2K + MiKTeX + Matplotlib 0.83.2 
> 
> 
> Oops.  Too hair trigger on the send button.
> Deleting the cache worked.
> But why?

I don't know, but I had noticed in the past that this sometimes makes a 
difference. Not that it explains anything, but I'd say that the cache 
mechanism could do with some improvement.
I think it seemed to me to be the font cache rather than the TeX cache 
which made the difference.

I will now relate, for the record, that if anyone is trying to get TeX 
support to work with Windows 98, they will be unsuccessful for the 
following reasons:
There is a problem with MPL's TeX and PS support under Windows 98 where 
Win98 generates resource errors. This is related to Win98's awful pipes 
support; popen2 and popen3 calls basically do not work properly.
I have tried adding close() calls to the pipe input handle following 
each usage of a pipe. The idea is to force the pipes to be flushed. This 
improves the situation, although it does not guarantee a 100% fix, since 
I think the close() call requests that Windows flush and destroy the 
pipes but this can take an indeterminate time to act on. I don't know of 
a better way of doing this like any method of checking that a pipe has 
finished all its I/O activities.
One day I may try changing the os.popen calls to os.spawnl instead, 
since this approach should work.
The other small problem is something I suggested in a previous post 
(dated July 10th) which was not implemented, to do with Win98 returning 
"DVIPNG.EXE" instead of "dvipng" in response to
running "dvipng --version".
The fix here is to change the line:
             if line.startswith('dvipng '):
to
             if line.lower().startswith('dvipng'):

For now, I'll just use my Win2k machine.

Gary