Hi Pete,


On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 6:29 PM Pete Houston <ph1@openstrike.co.uk> wrote:

[snip]

> What I usually do to see what the problem could be, is to download the
> rendered template which is used as the latex input. (The document without
> the header and footer lines.) Then I run pdflatex manually on the server
> with that file as its input. If there is a problem with the template or
> with the pdflatex setup, running from a terminal shows 90% of the problems.

I actually did that a couple of days ago when the printing returned the
latex source rather than the postscript - I was able to run that by hand
and it seemed to process fine. The resulting postscript looked OK and
there were no errors that I could determine.

Ok. One of the things that comes to mind is that the PATH and other environment settings differ between your invocation from the command line and the invocation from the server. You can inspect the environment variables defined in the server from setup.pl; after logging into your company database from setup.pl, you can select the last button on the page "System Info". On the resulting page, there's a section "Environment". This section indicates the environment variables your server is running with. Mine has a PATH setting of "/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/pgsql/bin" which includes the pdflatex binary in /usr/bin.

If your environment doesn't include your `pdflatex` binary, please check the "ledgersmb.conf" file you may (not) have. If you don't, there's an example in doc/conf/ledgersmb.conf.default. This config file has an "[environment]" section which also includes a PATH setting. You can use that to override the path setting your server starts up with.

 

I have re-done it now (having removed the 1st and last lines to allow
delivery of the latex to the user) and here is the full output:

I can't see anything specifically alarming about this output...
 
[snip]

>
> The most up-to-date documentation for templating that I have is:
> https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/blob/master/doc/templating/templating-guide.tex
> ; recently I started to collect all available template variables, with the
> intent to document them. The variables are available (by name) at
> https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/wiki/Template-variables.
>
> Let me know where your priorities lie, that'll help focus the effort to the
> immediately useful.

Really, we need to get the postscript/pdf output working. Not being able
to generate printable invoices is a stopper. If there's any extra
debugging or similar that we can enable to track down why the latex
process is giving these failures that would be great.

Ok. Then I'll keep my focus on helping you out with this problem, while continuing down the path that I was already pursuing for other project work.
 
In the meantime I will go through the templating guide and see if there
is anything in there which I can use to solve this.

Thanks again,

You're welcome!

Regards,
 
--
Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.
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