Asilata Bapat <[email protected]> writes: > But it seems to me that there is still the following problem in ox-html.el. > The documentation of org-html-format-latex does not make it clear that its > last argument, the info plist, *has to* contain the property :output-file in > order to avoid a runtime error! > > The further heart of the matter is the weird behaviour of > file-name-directory: in particular, running (file-name-directory "") gives > nil, while running (file-name-directory nil) throws an error. I don't > understand why those two calls should behave differently. > > Anyway, because of this issue, an unsuspecting external call to > org-html-format-latex is doomed to fail. Because it probably won't explicitly > include :output-file in its info plist. This does not seem good!
Right. However, do note that we will likely deprecate org-html-format-latex in one of the future releases, when we merge the latex preview branch. CCing Karthik. Karthik, could you please take a look and consider whether this situation will be problematic on the branch? As for more near-term solution, we should at least document :output-file behavior in the docstring. Whether we need to throw an error if :output-file is not defined is another question. It mainly boils down what is more useful - is it better to throw the problem into the caller's face or is it better to avoid failures. Another, even more radical, option could be falling back to mathjax/verbatim when :output-file is nil. I also note that the reported problem affects exporting to buffer from emacs -Q. If org-html-with-latex is set to, say, 'dvipng, exporting an Org buffer with latex fragments to buffer and not to file, will err. -- Ihor Radchenko // yantar92, Org mode maintainer, Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>. Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>, or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>
