Kosmorro's PDF generator

Kosmorro can export the computation results to PDF files that you can use for your obervation nights. The PDF generator uses LaTeX, a language designed for high-quality documents composition. This page explains how to use it.

Prerequisites

Before you use Kosmorro's PDF generator, you will need to install a TeXLive distribution software:

  • on Linux, TeXLive is usually available in your package manager repositories.
    • On Debian and derivatives, install the texlive and the texlive-latex-extra packages from your distribution's repository.
    • On Arch Linux and derivatives, install the texlive-core and texlive-bin packages from your extra repositories.
  • on FreeBSD, install Kosmorro with the PDF=on option.
  • on macOS, install the basic version of MacTeX, the port of TeXLive for Mac:
    • with HomeBrew (recommended): brew install basictex
    • from the official website: head to the Smaller download page and download and install the BasicTeX.pkg package.

How to export a PDF file

The PDF generator can be used simply by adding the following arguments to any Kosmorro command:

  • --format=pdf: tells Kosmorro you want a PDF export
  • --output={path}: tells Kosmorro where to save the PDF file

For instance, if you want to save a PDF file in $HOME/Documents/observation_night.pdf with the computation results for tomorrow in Lille, France, invoke the following command:

kosmorro \
    --date=+1d \
    --latitude=50.5824 \
    --longitude=3.0624 \
    --format=pdf \
    --output=$HOME/Documents/observation_night.pdf

Note that you can optionaly disable the graph generation with the --no-graph argument if you don't want it. In this case, the ephemerides will be output in a simple table.

If the observation coordinates are missing, the PDF document will not contain the ephemerides section.

Frequently Asked Questions

I am getting a Building PDF was not possible, because some dependencies are not installed error

Kosmorro uses the pdflatex command to generate the PDF document.

Check that you have installed TeXLive as explained in this page, and that the pdflatex command is in your $PATH:

  • Try to invoke which pdflatex. If you are getting a not found error, it means that TeXLive is not in your $PATH. Read your OS distribution's manual to fix this.
  • Try to generate a test PDF from the dumb LaTeX file: decompress the ZIP file, open a terminal in the extracted folder and invoke pdflatex dumb.tex

If the test PDF file is correctly generated, but you still cannot generate a PDF file, you are most likely facing a bug. Please consider opening an issue on GitHub, so we can investigate it.