Calling pdftops does not work in Matlab - matlab

Question

I want to use the export_fig package for Matlab. At one point this worked, but now it's broken. The error occurs here:
>> system('pdftops -h')
dyld: Library not loaded: /opt/local/lib/libtiff.5.dylib
Referenced from: /opt/local/bin/pdftops
Reason: Incompatible library version: pdftops requires version 8.0.0 or later, but libtiff.5.dylib provides version 6.0.0
pdftops -h: Trace/breakpoint trap
But when I call pdftops from my own bash terminal everything works fine. I suppose it must be because Matlab has some bad library paths or something, but I don't know where to go from here?
Some relevant environmental vars used by matlab:
>> system('env')
SHELL=/bin/bash
OSG_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/openscenegraph/lib/maci64
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/texbin
__CHECKFIX1436934=1
XFILESEARCHPATH=/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/java/jre/maci64/jre/lib/locale/%L/%T/%N%S:
DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH=/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/os/maci64:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/bin/maci64/../../Contents/MacOS:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/bin/maci64:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/extern/lib/maci64:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/java/jre/maci64/jre/lib/./native_threads:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/java/jre/maci64/jre/lib/./server:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/java/jre/maci64/jre/lib/./lib/jli
SHLVL=1
__KMP_REGISTERED_LIB_33586=0x124404710-cafeb339-libiomp5.dylib
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/os/maci64:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/bin/maci64/../../Contents/MacOS:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/bin/maci64:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/extern/lib/maci64:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/java/jre/maci64/jre/lib/./native_threads:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/java/jre/maci64/jre/lib/./server:/Applications/MATLAB_R2013b.app/sys/java/jre/maci64/jre/lib/./lib/jli

Answer 1

If you take a look at the error message, MATLAB uses libtiff to call pdftops, but only has version 6.0.0. It says it needs version 8.0.0 or later. There has been a case where this happened before here on StackOverflow. Someone was trying to install mexopencv and has encountered the same error that you're talking about: Compiling mexopencv in OS X 10.9 with Xcode 5 and Matlab R2013b
Though this is unrelated to what you're doing, they encountered the libtiff error that you speak of. They provide two solutions how to fix this error:
Go into MATLAB's root directory, then go bin/os directory where os is the directory of the operating system you are using (in my case, it's maci64). To get into the root directory, in the command prompt do this: cd/(matlabroot). Once you're here, locate the libtiff.5.dylib file and rename it to something like libtiff.5.dylib.bak so that the libtiff libraries that are used are the ones that are default to your system rather than what MATLAB is using internally in the program.
Force MATLAB to point to the library that is part of the system rather than using the one built into MATLAB. As such, in MATLAB's command prompt, run this command:
setenv('DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES','/opt/local/lib/libtiff.5.dylib');
Once you do this, you may get further errors that are similar but are with other libraries. As such, you need to keep appending these libraries in the second parameter of setenv and colon-delimiting them until you resolve the issues. You need to make sure that you're pointing to the ones on your system rather than the ones installed with MATLAB. In your case, you have to do:
setenv('DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES', ...
'/opt/local/lib/libtiff.5.dylib:/opt/local/lib/l‌​ibcurl.4.dylib');
Glad this helped!