Re: [Bug-AUCTeX] preview-1.287; Installation warns about impossibilities

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2013-06-29 at 10:03:59 +0200, Tassilo Horn wrote:

 > Reinhard Kotucha <address@hidden> writes:
 > 
 > Hi Reinhard,
 > 
 > >  > Yes, the Emacs and Ghostscript requirements are already
 > >  > mentioned in the AUCTeX manual.
 > >
 > > BTW, there is rarely a need to install Ghostscript explicitly.
 > > On Unix systems it's ubiquitous anyway, MacTeX provides
 > > Ghostscript, and both, TeXLive and MikTeX provide a "hidden" (not
 > > in PATH) Ghostscript for Windows.
 > 
 > Oh, good to know.  Now preview.el tries rungs, mgs, GSWIN32C.EXE,
 > and gs in that order.  Before, on windows it always required
 > GSWIN32C.EXE, else gs.

Hi Tassilo,
thanks.  However, I'm not sure anymore about mgs.  I don't have
Windows and can't test anything myself.  But I googled a bit today and
found a few nasty things.  It seems that mgs.exe is not a wrapper but
just a re-named gswin32c.exe.  This means that it uses compile-time
search paths for Ghostscript's lib and fonts directories unless you
set environment variables.

This is bad because every program using mgs has to be adapted.  Even
if mgs -help works properly, one can't conclude that anything else
works because the interpreter isn't initialized if you only ask for
the help message.  A better test is to run mgs without any arguments.
It might complain that gs_init.ps cannot be found.

  http://blog.miktex.org/category/MiKTeX-How-To.aspx

Thus, I recommend not to call mgs.exe whithout prior testing.  The
fact that it's in PATH but most likely doesn't work out-of-the box is
annoying.

Sorry, I should better had investigated before making such a
suggestion.


However, rungs in TeX Live works differently.  All scripts in TeX Live
are accessed by symlinks on Unix and by wrappers on Windows.  The
wrappers always make the hidden Ghostscript and Perl visible to the
script invoked by the wrapper.  BTW, the following scripts are also
available in TeX Live:

  eps2eps pdfopt ps2pdf ps2pdf13 ps2ps pdf2dsc ps2ascii ps2pdf12
  ps2pdf14 ps2ps2

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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