In St. Croix

A few weeks ago, I was asked if the Biology Department could support a faculty member who wanted to have an instance of Mediawiki set up with an extension that could render TeX. Over the years, I've had several people want capabilities like that, but it hasn't been a high enough priority to actually set it up. I met with the faculty member and, after a few minutes discussion, it sounded to me like what they really needed was Drupal that could render TeX. And it turns out that there's a Drupal module for that: Drutex. I set up a test instance to play with it, installed the module, and began testing.

The first big challenge was to install a working TeX implementation for Solaris. I couldn't get texlive2008 to work -- dvipng would segfault reliably. I found tetex3 at sunfreeware that worked. OK.

The next big challenge was that drutex didn't know how to work with the private file uploads mechanism in drupal. I switched to public and that worked. OK.

The instructor wanted to be able to get tex and pdf versions of the documents, but it appeared that the module was using the wrong path to build the URLs for those. I fixed that. OK.

I finally had a more-or-less working install and let the instructor begin exploring it. We haven't figured out how to include graphics. It looks like it can only render one page of TeX -- it only shows you the last page and the others are AWOL. It also doesn't seem to render some things, like colored text. Finally, it doesn't like it when you choose a different template to render with -- not sure what's going on there. It looks like the module really needs a maintainer. As if I needed another full-time job.