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I'm running a fresh install of Arch Linux and if I try to view a pdf file in doc-view or pdf-view, I get the following error message:

No PNG support is available, or some conversion utility for pdf files is missing. Unable to render file. View extracted text instead

A quick web search didn't provide any leads as how to resolve this issue - actually, I don't even know what exactly the issue is.

Stefan Mesken
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  • Was your Emacs compiled with png-support? (i.e. linked to libpng) – asjo May 27 '16 at 17:57
  • @asjo The installation was done by pacman. How can I check whether it is linked and how can I link it to libpng, if that's not the case? – Stefan Mesken May 27 '16 at 18:18
  • You can check which libraries a binary is linked against by using the ldd(1) command. I don't know how pacman/Arch works, but I guess you need libpng-dev (or whatever the development package for libpng is called in Arch) installed, when compiling Emacs. – asjo May 27 '16 at 20:55

1 Answers1

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The two possibilities that I see based on the error message are:

  1. Emacs was not compiled with png support
  2. You do not have a program to convert from pdf to png installed

The ways to check each of these are:

  1. Try to open a png in Emacs if you see a picture in image mode (you may need to hit C-c C-c or something) then you have png support.
  2. Open a terminal and run gs. if this program is installed then you should be good. Otherwise, install Ghostscript

If you don't have png support them I don't really know what you can do easily. You may be able to find some distro specific instructions for a more complete installation or you may have to build Emacs yourself.

I should probably add that if you get docview working then you should look into pdftools as it can give you some more advanced pdf-specific features

Dan Robertson
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