Why is MATLAB Help browser showing unformatted text on Linux (R2018b)

In R2018b, when I bring up the Help browser, e.g. using

doc classdef

it brings up a window, but it's just unformatted text, and no graphics.

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04. It is fine on R2018a.

[Alexander Maye]

Same here, openSUSE Leap 15.0. Maybe something is wrong in the java configuration?

[Jan]

Did you ask the technical support team of MathWorks already?

[Marek]

Same on Fedora 28.

[Julio Larco]

Same ubuntu 18.04

Answer 1

[Ken Morrison]

I was able to fix this problem on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Matlab R2018b. The following command, run from the system terminal, showed that the system was missing libgconf-2-4.

ldd ~/.matlab/R2018b/HtmlPanel/glnxa64/chromium/jxbrowser-chromium | grep -i found

Output shows missing shared library.

libgconf-2.so.4 => not found

Solution: Install libgconf-2-4 AND restart Matlab

sudo apt install libgconf-2-4

Thanks to Alexander Maye for pointing me at jxbrowser-chromium.

[Richard Stephens]

That's done it. Thanks to both for combined help!

[Jakub Nawala]

This also worked for me (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Matlab R2018b). Thank you!

[Ivan Izotov]

Hey, thank you SO MUCH!!! I was trying to solve this problem for a week with no success until I found this thread! Thank you!!! (Ubuntu 18.04.2 +R2018b)

[Julio Larco]

thanks. Problem solved in ubuntu 18.04.2

[JiaDa]

Thank you. It's works for me (ubuntu 18.04 LTS)

[okultekin]

Thanks a lot. It's works for me on UBUNTU 18.04 LTS too

[Priodyuti Pradhan]

Thanks a lot! The above answer solve the problem on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Matlab 2019a.

[zr zug]

After I install matlab R2020a on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the help document can not display normally. The possible reason might be similar to this question, because I find that the jxbrowser-chromium dir disappears. The dir exsits in neither ~/.matlab/R2020a/HtmlPanel/ or .../Polyspace/R2020a/sys. I only find the dir in .../Polyspace/R2020a/java/jarext. I wonder whether I can directly copy the jxbrower-chromium folder to the path .../Polyspace/R2020a/sys or is there any other solutions.

[Gregory Kriehn]

Installing Matlab R2020a on Fedora 32 produces silimilar problems. There are no missing libraries when running the command, however.

Answer 2

[Alexander Maye]

Just had a conversion with Mathwork's support, and this helped me to solve the problem in openSUSE Leap 15 in the following way:

1) make ~/.matlab/R2018b/HtmlPanel/glnxa64/chromium/jxbrowser-chromium executable

2) install libcrypto.so.1.0.0

On openSUSE, this library is provided by the package openssl1_0_0, and after installation, the help browser runs fine.

[Richard Stephens]

Thanks for taking the trouble to answer, unfortunately, these commands did not work on my system (Ubuntu 18.04).

1) This command returned:

make: Nothing to be done for 'jxbrowser-chromium'.
make: *** No rule to make target 'executable'. Stop.

2) On Ubuntu I used:

sudo apt-get install libssl1.0.0

which successfully installed the library, but it made no difference to the help browser in Matlab.

[Alexander Maye]

Sorry for the confusion. To make something executable, enter chmod +x something.

Answer 3

[Bernard Llanos]

I had the same symptoms on Ubuntu 18.04 (as well as the error described here), with R2018b, but for a slightly different problem:

ldd $MATLAB_INSTALLATION_FOLDER/R2018b/sys/jxbrowser-chromium/glnxa64/chromium/jxbrowser-chromium | grep -i found

The output shows that I had a broken link:

libgcrypt.so.11 => not found

since

$MATLAB_INSTALLATION_FOLDER/R2018b/sys/jxbrowser-chromium/glnxa64/chromium/libgcrypt.so.11

was a symbolic link to

/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcrypt.so.20.0.5

whereas I had

/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcrypt.so.20.2.1

I replaced the symbolic link with a link to the generic link

/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcrypt.so.20

which resolved the issues.

[Abhigna Kurella]

Thank you. I cannot find a folder called chromium in glnxa64. I have only two folders lib and xulrunner.

Is something missing from mine?

I find that, I have libgcrypt.so.20.2.1 installed .Can you please tell how to replace the symbolic link with a generic link.

[Bernard Llanos]

You are probably looking in

.../sys/jxbrowser/glnxa64

instead of

.../sys/jxbrowser-chromium/glnxa64

By generic link, I meant a symbolic link to a file that does not specify the version number so precisely (20 instead of 20.2.1 or 20.0.5)

If you run

ls -l /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcrypt.so.20*

you should see that there are two items listed, one which is libgcrypt.so.20, and which is actually a symbolic link to the other, which is a file called libgcrypt.so.20.2.1. If you create a symbolic link to libgcrypt.so.20, the link will be valid even when libgcrypt.so.20.2.1 is replaced with a newer version, because libgcrypt.so.20 will have been updated to point to the newer version.

[Shirshendhu Panday 16BEE0129]

Iam getting same problem on Windows after the update but I can't search anything in the help window and online documentation is also not working.

Answer 4

[Alexander Krings]

I was able to solve this problem for R2019a on a CENTOS7 (64bit/only) system.

In the first step i located the jxbrowser-chromium (MATLAB/R2019a/sys/jxbrowser-chromium/glnxa64/chromium)

I opened a terminal and entered>

ldd jxbrowser-chromium | grep -i found

which gave me

libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found

Luckily I had the idea to search if the file was already on my system. I do not want to risk downloading a library that does cryptography "obviously" .. somewhere on the internet.

find . | grep so.1.0.0

showed me

./bin/glnxa64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0
./bin/glnxa64/libssl.so.1.0.0

that the missing file came already with the installation. I copied the file and send it to

MATLAB/R2019a/sys/jxbrowser-chromium/glnxa64/chromium

and also set

webutils.htmlrenderer('chromium');

in Matlab Command Window. Restart Matlab and it works. But, loading the pages is still pretty slow. This could be improved !

Answer 5

[yunhui zhou]

Same problem for Matlab R2018b on Kubuntu 19.04. In my case, running:

ldd ~/.matlab/R2018b/HtmlPanel/glnxa64/chromium/jxbrowser-chromium | grep -i found

showed that I was missing libgconf-2.so.4 and ibcrypto.so.1.0.0. I solved the problem by running:

sudo apt install libgconf-2-4
cp /usr/local/MATLAB/R2018b/bin/glnxa64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 ~/.matlab/R2018b/HtmlPanel/glnxa64/chromium/

However, even after this rendering in the help broswer was slow, though it can correctly format the page.