Configuring an external renderer

Owned by Praveena Manohar
Last updated: Jun 20, 2022
1 min read

When installing LaTeX Math and/or deciding to use the external renderer for the first time, you must ensure that LaTeX Math can access the correct executables. 

Installing LaTeX in Windows

  1. Download the MiKTeX installer. Version 2.9 will be suitable for this purpose.

  2. Run the installer and be sure to set "Install missing packages on-the-fly" to Yes.

  3. Ensure that LaTeX Math can find the executables by doing one of the following:

    1. Restart Confluence to update the system path (recommended)

    2. Or add the full path to the executables in LaTeX Math settings (e.g. C:\Program Files\MiKTeX\bin\latex.exe)

Installing LaTeX in Linux (Ubuntu)

  1. Run sudo apt-get install texlive dvipng preview-latex-style

Installing LaTeX in Linux (RHEL)

  1. Run sudo yum install texlive emacs-auctex

Troubleshooting

If you encounter macro render errors related to missing pages, you should ensure that the following latex packages are installed. This applies to both Windows and Linux:

  • preview

  • dvipng

  • lh

  • cyrillic

  • cbfonts

  • greek-fontenc

  • cm-super

  • lm

  • eurosym

  • mathtools

  • standalone

  • dvisvgm

  • xkeyval

More information

After following the above instructions, you can may wish to alter the LaTeX header and footer in LaTeX Math settings to use additional packages or otherwise alter the way LaTeX is rendered. The default settings will be appropriate for most users. Packages referred to in the header must be available on the server that Confluence is installed on.

For Data Center instances of Confluence, please ensure the above software and packages are installed on each node.