[Info-AUCTeX] Release: dvipng 1.8

[David Kastrup]

The following release announcement has been posted to the auctex-devel
list by Jan-Åke Larsson <address@hidden>.  dvipng has been designed
with a focus of allowing it to be the main rendering engine for DVI
files in AUCTeX's preview-latex (by customizing `preview-image-type'
to `dvipng').

Release notes for version 1.8 of the dvipng package:

This program makes PNG graphics from DVI files as obtained from TeX
and its relatives.


The 1.8 release adds the possibility to include bitmapped images (PNG,
JPEG, and GIF), and changes PostScript inclusion so that the image is
not cropped to the boundingbox (unless requested) and has a
transparent background. From now on, for performance reasons, the
output image will be truecolor if an image is included.

The output quality is substantially improved when using the Freetype
font library. Freetype hinting has previously been disabled in dvipng
(because of substandard output from the Computer Modern font), but
from the 1.8 release onwards, hinting will be enabled in a mode that
prefers shape over contrast (which works well with the Computer Modern
font).

In short, the output quality is visibly better when Freetype is
available than when it isn't.

The release also fixes a few bugs and enhances the internal color
cache for better performance.