dvipng: Prerequisites
2.1 Prerequisites
=================
* The GD Graphics Draw library, libgd
The drawing library 'libgd' is necessary, and is downloadable at
<http://www.boutell.com/gd>, and there are binary packages for most
operating systems from their respective distributors. In any case,
the latest version of the library installs using 'autoconf' so it
should not be difficult for you to install it from source, and then
proceed with installing dvipng.
* The path-searching library kpathsea
Kpathsea is most likely included in your LaTeX installation, but it
may happen that ./configure does not find it; see below. If you do
not have it, download it from <http://www.ctan.org> and compile it.
I have no experience with this, so I cannot help much here.
* The font-rendering library FreeType 2
While not strictly necessary, a recent FreeType 2 is recommended
since dvipng currently will produce better-quality images when this
library is available. To take advantage of this, you should have
at least FreeType 2.1.9.
FreeType 2 will enable direct support for PostScript and TrueType
fonts, so that dvipng will not need to generate bitmapped variants
on disk of the TeX fonts since modern TeX distributions include
PostScript versions of them. Then, you can render images at
different (and unusual) resolutions without cluttering the disk
with lots of bitmapped fonts.
Finally, it will enable subfont support in dvipng. That is, if you
want to render CJK-LaTeX characters, you must have FreeType 2
installed.
* libpng and libz
To be able to compress and write PNG files to disk, dvipng (or
really libgd) uses libpng which in turn uses libz. These should be
available on any modern system, if not, download them and install
them.
* The 'texinfo' package
This is needed for building the documentation.
Info Catalog
dvipng: Installation
dvipng: Configure