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I'm looking for some advice to configure my windows system in such a way that I can get mk4ht to compile into an open office document using miktex.

If I create a simple tex file called i.tex

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
    Hello World
\end{document}

And I compile with mk4ht oolatex i.tex

  • on linux it works -> great I'm all set at home!
  • on windows I see no errors, the file is produced, but it is empty. -> This means I can't compile at work or anywhere other than my home PC. Since I am not the maintainer of these work or friends computers, I can't switch to texlive.

I'm wondering if there are any additional prerequisites or if I have any texmf paths to setup or anything to point towards the openoffice installation.

I feel my question is similar to the following, but not completely, and the answers weren't specific to my current case.

Conversion to *.odt - error in odt's styles.xml

How to convert .tex file to .doc file with tex4ht

Update: Interupting my compile process so that the entirety of the command line feedback could be examined without getting lost in the scroll size of the windows terminal, I can now see an error!

xtpipes -i "C:/Program Files/MiKTeX 2.9/tex4ht/xtpipes/" -o i.4oo i.tmp
Error: Could not find or load main class xtpipes

This now means this question is along the same lines as Converting LaTeX to OpenOffice but those 2010 vintage answers don't seem to be inline with what I'll need to do to correct my problem. I don't even think my system has C:/Program Files/MiKTeX 2.9/tex4ht/xtpipes/ it does however have C:\Users\EngBIRD\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\2.9\tex4ht\xtpipes

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  • Does the terminal output contain any error messages after the line containing t4ht.c (2012-07-25-19:28 kpathsea) (it can be a little bit different message on Miktex)? I hope that we fixed Miktex issues with the ODT output few months back. – michal.h21 Jan 15 '18 at 7:13
  • Hi @michal.h21 thanks for your reply. I see no errors even remotely similar to the line you propose, I've searched many of the substrings of your proposal with no avail. I've added the complete contents of my log file to the question. – EngBIRD Jan 16 '18 at 4:57
  • It works ok for me. Check the terminal output (not the log) if it mentions some errors -- most importantly the lines at the end with "System". – Ulrike Fischer Jan 16 '18 at 13:26
  • Your tex4ht.4ht and other tex4ht files are very old (much older than mine). Check for updates with the user update manager. – Ulrike Fischer Jan 16 '18 at 13:29
  • @UlrikeFischer According to the miktex manager there are no updates available, but I may have try an alternate mirror or source. – EngBIRD Jan 16 '18 at 14:18
2

A bit long for a comment.

Your example works for me on a up-to-date Miktex.

Looking at your log file (gone after the edit) one can see that you have a multiuser installation. Some files are in C:\Program Files. e.g.:

  C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\latex\base\article.cls

and some in your user profile:

  (C:\Users\EngBIRD\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\2.9\tex\generic\tex4ht\tex4ht.sty
   version 2008-10-27-17:23

The date of the second shows that the files in your user account are very old (my tex4ht.sty is from 2016-07-18).

So you should at first update the packages in your user profile. Normally the windows start menu of a multiuser installation has links to two update managers -- one for the user and one for the main tree. But such links can get loss e.g. at windows updates. You can recreate them (probably) by copying the entries that you have and then remove _admin (from miktex-update_admin and perhaps also from copystart_admin) from the call they contain.

Beside this you can start the gui of the user package manager by calling

 mpm

in a command line. 

 mpm --find-updates

will list all packages that can be updated. 

 mpm --update

will update everything.

Other options can be found in the documentation https://docs.miktex.org/2.9/manual/mpm.html.

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  • I'm trying out the update now, the mpm that launches from the console looks identical to the one I'm used to accessing from the miktex folder in my start menu - hopefully it will be updating different packages though. The issue I'm most intrigued by concerning my out of date miktex, is that I rebuilt windows and installed miktex from a fresh download less than a year ago. I guess some of it's base packages aren't being updated and overall, I haven't been updating my system properly. – EngBIRD Jan 20 '18 at 2:24
  • So I couldn't get the user updater to complete without errors. It was complaining about some fontconfig stuff in appdata. Having read through many of your other posts I decided to stop using the automatic local installation of on the fly installations. So I deleted the appdata miktex folder, changed the setting, and manually installed the packages as they were prompted. This seems to have worked in letting mk4ht compile, but I'm still characterizing the performance to check for successful compilation of more complex examples. – EngBIRD Jan 20 '18 at 3:42

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