Re: [AUCTeX] preview-latex with pdftex and a pdf2png tool

[David Kastrup]

David Reitter <address@hidden> writes:

> On 12 Oct 2005, at 22:55, David Kastrup wrote:
>
>> By writing wagonloads of Elisp code and making sure that the tool
>> does the right job in all circumstances, for example with bounding
>> boxes and resolutions.  Here is how we integrated dvibitmap into
>> preview-latex for getting around GhostScript in the DVI case as
>> much as possible: Jan-Åke made sure that dvibitmap did the right
>> job by looking at it, scrapping it and writing dvipng from scratch,
>> and he and myself wrote wagonloads of Elisp code to integrate it
>> into preview-latex (which took me an inordinately long time and
>> worked by Jan-Åke giving up on me and writing something horrible
>> himself which I subsequently had to help replace by something
>> proper).
>
> OK, I think I got the message. By the way, pdf2png works better than
> Bumgartner writes - in particular the slightly different ObjC /
> Cocoa based implementation (which still uses Quartz), but you may be
> right about bounding boxes etc.!
>
> OK, what about another approach:
>
> Suppose PDF is one of the image types supported by Emacs, would
> AUCTeX be able to directly use the PDFs generated with pdflatex?

Depends on just how well it is supported.  It must be possible to pick
out any given image from the file, and render it with prespecified
dimensions.

And then you have to be aware that the rendering process through
Ghostscript is _darn_ well optimized.  Fonts and similar stuff get
processed just once for a single document.  If PDF is one of the image
types supported by Emacs, it would have a hard time being nearly as
efficient.

The very first implementation of preview-latex used Emacs' "supported"
EPS image type.  It sucked really, really, really bad.

> On another note: mouse-1-follows-link is not respected when it comes
> to showing / hiding the images with mouse-1 instead of mouse-2. I
> think it should - I don't even have a mouse-2 (physically) on my
> laptop, nor am I used to it for anything else but context menus...

Agreed.  Any clue how this is accomplished in general?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum