Installing pdf2svg in Mac Os X with homebrew: Fixing seg fault

I had a lot of problems with pdf2svg since it was giving me a seg fault. What I did at the end was:

Instaling as follows:
cairo is too old, increase version
pango, remove ENV.x11
poppler  --with-glib, remove ENV.x11, increase version to 0.20.0
gdk-pixbuf
atk
gtk+
pdf2svg

About gtk+ homebrew formula

Link the hombrew cairo/include/cairo dir to /opt/X11/include/cairo. Then edit the formula and add
# NEW START
    ENV.append 'LDFLAGS', '-L/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.10.2/lib'
    ENV.append 'CPPFLAGS',  '-I/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.10.2/include'
# NEW END

About htop-osx homebrew formula

This formula does not work if you have installed a newer libtool. The solution is to add
system "autoreconf -i"
to the formula, after the system autogen.sh call, before the configure.

About poppler homebrew formula

In order to compile successfully the homebrew poppler formula, it is necessary to:
- move/rename the old cairo directorry, /opt/X11/include/cairo , which is used by default by the poppler formula.
- Install  cairo with homebrew.
- Since the previous is a keg only formula, follow the instructions at the end of the installation, adding
ENV.append 'LDFLAGS', '-L/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.10.2/lib'
ENV.append 'CPPFLAGS',  '-I/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.10.2/include' 
inside install function before configure
- Install it.

xmgrace and png lib on Snow Leopard 10.6.8

I am using xmgrace a lot for plotting. Although I still like gnuplot, and its 3D utilities are beyond those of xmgrace (which is only 2D), I find xmgrace usefull for storing all the graph info into one single file. Yes, I know, I can save the gnuplot commands, and then rebuild the graph with the original data, etc, but xmgrace just contains everuthing in a single file.

I am currently printing to both pdf and jpeg formats from xmgrace, since png support was broken. But I need png support. After some digging into the system, I found that Snow Leopard has several versions for libpng and its include files, changing the lib/inc version number. At the end, I foudn the following solution to the configure script whichs sets everything up:

./configure LDFLAGS="-L/opt/X11/lib" CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/X11/include/libpng15" --with-png-library=-lpng15

This means I am using the png library installed from XQuartz. BTW, if you are using homebrew as me, just edit the grace formula to add the flags shown above:

  def install
    #ENV.x11
    ENV.append "LDFLAGS", "-L/opt/X11/lib"
    ENV.append "CPPFLAGS", "-I/opt/X11/include/libpng15"
    system "./configure", "--disable-debug", "--disable-dependency-tracking",
      "--prefix=#{prefix}", "--with-zlib",
      "--with-png-library=-lpng15",
      "--enable-grace-home=#{prefix}"

    system "make install"
  end


If you have gfortran, do not have f77, and you want the fortran tests, make a symbolic link from gfrotran to f77.

Latex and Inkscape on Snow Leopard

Recently, I have been using the great Inkscape (version 0.48.2) drawing tool for my work. But, I also needed LaTeX support. I then tried to use the textext plugin, but I faced many problems with inkscape and the plugin extensions, with error messages related to lxml support and others. At the end, what worked was :

1. Remove the python internal support for inkscape (see the useful blog http://blog.lrem.net/2010/07/05/fixing-inkscape-python-extensions/) :
   cd /Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/
   mv python OLD.python
   
2. Install, if have not done so already, the lxml and maybe numpy packeges for python:
   easy_install numpy lxml
   
3. Move the textext scripts to /Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/extensions

gdb-7.3.1 on Snow Leopard

I was updating the default gdb debugger on Snow Leopard (version 6.3.50) to a more current one (7.3.1), because I need better support for the STL.

The source compilation was OK. But, the executable should be signed in order to work (A security measure). This is well explained on http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/BuildingOnDarwin . After that, I can call ddd as:

ddd --debugger "/usr/local/bin/gdb-7.3.1" ./test.x

Of course, this implies I have configured/compiled gdb as:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-python


The last flag is to active python pretty printers for stl containers inside gdb.