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A number of issues are known concerning the interoperation with various other software. Some of the known problems can be solved by moving to newer versions of the problematic software or by simple patches.
• Problems with Ghostscript: | ||
• Font problems with Dvips: | ||
• Emacs problems: | ||
• Too small bounding boxes: | ||
• x-symbol interoperation: | ||
• Middle-clicks paste instead of toggling: |
If you find something not mentioned here, please send a bug report using M-x preview-report-bug RET, which will fill in a lot of information interesting to us and send it to the bug-auctex@gnu.org list. Please use the bug reporting commands if at all possible.
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Most of the problems encountered come from interaction with Ghostscript. It is a good idea to have a fairly recent version of Ghostscript installed. One problem occurs if you have specified the wrong executable under Windows: the command line version of Ghostscript is called GSWIN32C.EXE, not GSWIN32.EXE.
When Ghostscript fails, the necessary information and messages from Ghostscript go somewhere. If Ghostscript fails before starting to process images, you’ll find the information at the end of the process buffer you can see with C-c C-l. If Ghostscript fails while processing a particular image, this image will be tagged with clickable buttons for the error description and for the corresponding source file.
The default options configurable with
M-x customize-variable RET preview-gs-options RET
include the options -dTextAlphaBits=4 and -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4. These options have been reported to make Ghostscript 5.50 fail, but should work under Ghostscript 6.51 and later. If you are experiencing problems, it might help to customize them away. Of course, this also takes away the joy of antialiasing, so upgrading Ghostscript might not be the worst idea after all.
The device names have changed over time, so when using an old
Ghostscript, you may have problems with the devices demanded by the
customizable variable preview-image-creators
.
In that case, make sure they fit your version of Ghostscript, at least
the entry corresponding to the current value of
preview-image-type
.
While not being best in file size and image quality, setting
preview-image-creators
to jpeg
should probably be one of
the best bets for the purpose of checking basic operation, since that
device name has not changed in quite some time. But JPEG is
not intended for text, but for photographic images. On a more
permanent time scale, the best choice is to use PNG and
complain to your suppliers if either Emacs or Ghostscript fail to
properly accommodate this format.
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Some fonts have been reported to produce wrong characters with preview-latex. preview-latex calls Dvips by default with the option -Pwww in order to get scalable fonts for nice results. If you are using antialiasing, however, the results might be sufficiently nice with bitmapped fonts, anyway. You might try -Ppdf for another stab at scalable fonts, or other printer definitions. Use
M-x customize-variable RET preview-fast-dvips-command RET
and
M-x customize-variable RET preview-dvips-command RET
in order to customize this.
One particular problem is that several printer setup files (typically in a file called /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/config.pdf if you are using the -Ppdf switch) contain the G option for ‘character shifting’. This option will result in ‘fi’ being rendered as ‘£’ (British Pounds sign) in several fonts, unless your version of Dvips has a long-standing bug in its implementation fixed (only very recent versions of Dvips have).
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Don’t use Emacsen older than 21.3 on X11-based systems. On most other systems, you’ll need at least Emacs 22.1 or one of the developer versions leading up to it. Details can be found in Prerequisites in the AUCTeX manual.
For Emacs 21, no image support is available in Emacs under Windows. Without images, preview-latex is useless. The current CVS version of Emacs available from http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs now supports images including the PNG format, so Emacs 22 should work out of the box once it is released. Precompiled versions are available from http://crasseux.com/emacs and http://nqmacs.sf.net.
For detailed installation instructions for Windows, see Installation under MS Windows in the AUCTeX manual.
There is are two larger problems known with older XEmacs releases. One leads to seriously mispositioned baselines and previews hanging far above other text on the same line. This should be fixed as of XEmacs-21.4.9.
The other core bug causes a huge delay when XEmacs’s idea of the state of processes (like ghostscript) is wrong, and can lead to nasty spurious error messages. It should be fixed in version 21.4.8.
Previews will only remain from one session to the next if you have version 1.81 or above of the edit-utils package, first released in the 2002-03-12 sumo tarball.
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The bounding box of a preview is determined by the LaTeX package
using the pure TeX bounding boxes. If there is material extending
outside of the TeX box, that material will be missing from the
preview image. This happens for the label-showing boxes from
the showkeys
package. This particular problem can be
circumvented by using the showlabels
option of the preview
package.
In general, you should try to fix the problem in the TeX code, like avoiding drawing outside of the picture with PSTricks.
One possible remedy is to set
preview-fast-conversion
to ‘Off’
(see The Emacs interface).
The conversion will take more time, but will then use the bounding boxes
from EPS files generated by Dvips.
Dvips generally does not miss things, but it does not understand
PostScript constructs like \resizebox
or \rotate
commands,
so will generate rather wrong boxes for those. Dvips can be helped with
the psfixbb
package option to preview
(see The LaTeX style file),
which will tag the corners of the included TeX box. This will mostly
be convenient for pure PostScript stuff like that created by
PSTricks, which Dvips would otherwise reserve no space for.
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Thanks to the work of Christoph Wedler, starting with version ‘4.0h/beta’ of x-symbol, the line parsing of AUCTeX and preview-latex is fully supported. Earlier versions exhibit problems. However, versions before 4.2.2 will cause a drastic slowdown of preview-latex’s parsing pass, so we don’t recommend to use versions earlier than that.
If you wonder what x-symbol is, it is a package that transforms various tokens and subscripts to a more readable form while editing and offers a few input methods handy especially for dealing with math. Take a look at http://x-symbol.sourceforge.net.
x-symbol versions up to 4.5.1-beta at least require an 8bit-clean TeX implementation (meaning that its terminal output should not use ‘^^’-started escape sequences) for cooperation with preview-latex. Later versions may get along without it, like preview-latex does now.
If you experience problems with circ.tex in connection with both
x-symbol and Latin-1 characters, you may need to change your language
environment or, as a last resort, customize the variable
LaTeX-command-style
by replacing the command latex
with
latex -translate-file=cp8bit
.
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This is probably the fault of your favorite package. flyspell.el and mouse-drag.el are known to be affected in versions before Emacs 21.3. Upgrade to the most recent version. What version of XEmacs might contain the fixes is unknown.
isearch.el also shows this effect while searches are in progress, but the code is such a complicated mess that no patch is in sight. Better just end the search with RET before toggling and resume with C-s C-s or similar afterwards. Since previews over the current match will auto-open, anyway, this should not be much of a problem in practice.
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