Can you look what is in the file?

it's a binary file when opening in a text editor. Using dvipdf to convert to PDF works but seems to output just a blank pdf.

Here's the tex that generates that dvi file:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{type1cm}



\usepackage{textcomp}


\usepackage[papersize={72in,72in},body={70in,70in},margin={1in,1in}]{geometry}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\fontsize{10.000000}{12.500000}{\rmfamily $0.0$}
\end{document}

Sounds like the problem in #6393; @WeatherGod can you elaborate on what's wrong / missing in the LaTeX install?

@choldgraf Can you run any of latex, pdflatex, pdftex, lualatex, luatex, etc., on that file without error, and is it viewable?

@choldgraf Actually, that file uses a huge paper size; I ran it and the text is really tiny if zoomed out to fit the whole page. Maybe something is really there in the top-left?

ah yeah, good catch. I see a 0.0 in the upper left if I zoom in a bunch. I generated the pdf by using dvipdfm c1d089b6baf6a9ebfc28a7497a9f3957.dvi

But does dvipng work on the file, too?

@QuLogic, the error message in the other issue is one that @mdboom and I added to _png.cpp to account for anomalous PNG reads. Essentially, a read went awry, but no exception message was left in the cpython interface, which is kind of like an unhandled exception in libpng or something.

I'm not sure what dvipng is. At least, I don't have it on my path.

That would explain why it failed :-p

We are being too aggressive translating errors coming from system process calls.

dvipng typically comes from your latex installation and we use it to convert math -> tex -> dvi -> png which we can then embed in a raster graphics if you want to use latex for text rendering.

so....what should I do? re-install latex or something?

You should be able to install packages with the mactex utilities. Not sure if it's in the mini install or what the right package is (try dvipng, probably), but hopefully a full reinstall should not be necessary.

Ah ok - I installed dvipng and it now errors on another missing package. I'll install these as needed with the texlive program. Will keep a list above for future ref.

Uninstalling my tex distribution and re-installing the full mactex distribution made this work for me, so I'm closing. Kinda sucks that you have to install a 5GB latex distribution in order to build the docs, but I guess that's the only (easy) option to build the latex examples.