[Pkg-gmagick-im-team] Image Magick Policy File

[Dirk Hünniger]

Hello,

I am maintaining the mediawiki2latex project to create downloadable 
files from MediaWiki articles. For the output formats ODT and EPUB I 
need to convert formulas from LaTeX to raster graphics. I use the 
latex2png program for that purpose. This does not work on recent 
releases of Ubuntu since it is forbidden for Image Magick to read PDF 
files. This is defined in the policy.xml file in the ImageMagick 
configuration directory. I can change that by hand and everything works 
fine. The currently proposed solution is to advise my users to change 
their policy.xml by hand as soon as the install mediawiki2latex. Is this 
the best possible solution or would it for example be possible to call a 
shell script that changes the policy.xml file as soon as a user does 
apt-get install mediawiki2latex. Is there some community decision making 
process that I could go through to achieve any solution that does not 
require my users to manually change the policy.xml file. A similar issue 
exists with large files. I could also resolve a lot of issues that 
occurred with images for the English Wikipedia by raising the 
appropriate limits in the policy.xml file. Also exchanging latex2png for 
an other program that does not have the issue can be considered.

Yours Dirk Hünniger