Let's first make sure that the machine has all updates installed. Is that sure?

Replying to jmckenna:

• I need the pdflatex utility (through pdftex) for the docs
• I tried to install pdftex on server through emerge
• compile fails while trying to build libpoppler ("../libpoppler.so.7.0.0: undefined reference to `png_set_longjmp_fn'"

The install from emerge works ok now. I didn't look deeper but it seems that poppler package use /usr/local/lib as default search path for libpng12.so, the trouble came from an older version installed in this directory.

• my guess is that libpoppler is linking to an old libpng (1.2 instead of 1.4)

You guess well, it tried tolink against libpng12.so file in /usr/local/lib.

Gerald can you give me a hand on this, or should I compile from source?

Done, hope the tool is correctly usable now.

Thanks for the fast response!

Unfortunately pdflatex has a problem on the server:

  This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (Web2C 2009)
  (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

I have also tried with a small sample file, still fails on server:

  pdflatex /opt/zoo-project-docs/trunk/_build/latex/sample.tex

      This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (Web2C 2009)
     (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

Further comments:

• I have followed advice in a TeX FAQ and tried to regenerate the formats (​http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=formatstymy)

  fmtutil --byfmt pdftex

  fmtutil --byfmt pdflatex

No change, no love :(

and executing 'fmtutil --all' with my user seems to copy many files into my user dir...no love though. must be something simple, will come back to this later.

and this seems to actually regenerate the formats for the server: ' sudo fmtutil-sys --all' but i get no love yet. k leaving for now :)

Replying to jmckenna:

Thanks for the fast response!

No problem, thank you for reporting issue.

I have also tried with a small sample file, still fails on server

This is now working after reinstalling luatex, texlive-core and texlive-latex through emerge.

Replying to markusn:

Let's first make sure that the machine has all updates installed. Is that sure?

I'm not sure about what do you mean by "last updates" here ?

for the record we also had to install the package: dev-texlive/texlive-latexextra

ZOOProject.pdf can now be generated, thanks Gerald!!!!!!!