preview-latex: The LaTeX style file
6.1 The LaTeX style file
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The main purpose of this package is the extraction of certain
environments (most notably displayed formulas) from LaTeX sources as
graphics. This works with DVI files postprocessed by either Dvips and
Ghostscript or dvipng, but it also works when you are using PDFTeX for
generating PDF files (usually also postprocessed by Ghostscript).
Current uses of the package include the preview-latex package for
WYSIWYG functionality in the AUCTeX editing environment, generation of
previews in LyX, as part of the operation of the pst-pdf package, the
tbook XML system and some other tools.
Producing EPS files with Dvips and its derivatives using the '-E'
option is not a good alternative: People make do by fiddling around with
'\thispagestyle{empty}' and hoping for the best (namely, that the
specified contents will indeed fit on single pages), and then trying to
guess the baseline of the resulting code and stuff, but this is at best
dissatisfactory. The preview package provides an easy way to ensure
that exactly one page per request gets shipped, with a well-defined
baseline and no page decorations. While you still can use the preview
package with the 'classic'
dvips -E -i
invocation, there are better ways available that don't rely on Dvips not
getting confused by PostScript specials.
For most applications, you'll want to make use of the 'tightpage'
option. This will embed the page dimensions into the PostScript or PDF
code, obliterating the need to use the '-E -i' options to Dvips. You
can then produce all image files with a single run of Ghostscript from a
single PDF or PostScript (as opposed to EPS) file.
Various options exist that will pass TeX dimensions and other
information about the respective shipped out material (including
descender size) into the log file, where external applications might
make use of it.
The possibility for generating a whole set of graphics with a single
run of Ghostscript (whether from LaTeX or PDFLaTeX) increases both speed
and robustness of applications. It is also feasible to use dvipng on a
DVI file with the options
-picky -noghostscript
to omit generating any image file that requires Ghostscript, then let a
script generate all missing files using Dvips/Ghostscript. This will
usually speed up the process significantly.
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preview-latex: For advanced users
preview-latex: For advanced users
preview-latex: The Emacs interface