[Tugindia] Error while previewing.

David Kastrup tugindia@tug.org
06 Dec 2002 11:30:49 +0100


"Baburaj A. Puthenveettil" <apbabu@mecheng.iisc.ernet.in> writes:

> On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, David Kastrup wrote:
> 
> Dear Kastrup,
> 
> > First I'd recommend upgrading to a newer XEmacs as mentioned above.
> > Apart from that, preview-latex 0.7.5 has been reported to install
> > right out of the box also under Windows XP.
> 
> 	The current version that I have seems to be lates XEmacs for
> windows at sourceforgenet.

I use neither XEmacs nor Windows, yet the information pertaining to
that is so readily available at XEmacs' download site
(URL:http://www.xemacs.org/Download/win32/) or mirrors that I am
surprised you should not be able to find it even after being told
your Emacs is outdated.

I quote from there:

    XEmacs and Supporting Libraries and Programs for Windows
    Netinstall Binaries

    XEmacs 21.4.10 "Military Intelligence (Windows)"

        You may install either a cygwin or native windows version from
        one of our world-wide mirrors closest to you, by just clicking
        on setup.exe.

[...]

    InstallShield Binaries
    Disclaimer

    Currently these InstallShield binaries are significantly behind
    latest versions for stable, gamma, and beta releases. Please use
    the Netinstaller Binaries instead (see above), which can also
    install a native windows version of XEmacs.

> > If you want to use the autoconf-based installation, you need to have
> > the Cygwin tools or a similar set of Unix-like utilities installed.
> > There is a file outlining a manual installation procedure in case you
> > don't want to use that.  Your XEmacs does not need to be of the
> > Cygwin variety, nor does your TeX, and during normal operation no
> > Unix-like utilities are required.
> 
> 	I have MSYS on the system. I downloaded latex preview, and put all 
> the files in 
>  
> C:\Program Files\XEmacs\xemacs-packages\lisp\preview-latex-0.7.5

Why would you do that?  This is a directory _internal_ to XEmacs.
The installation should be unpacked somewhere else, such as in
c:\tmp\preview or whatever.  In course of the installation, the
proper files will get transferred to XEmacs' appropriate directories.

> Tried running configure from this directory. It didnt detect
> XEmacs.

Which probably means that you don't have it in your PATH.  If you
don't want to put it there, configure needs to see the option
--with-xemacs="c:/Program Files/XEmacs/bin/xemacs.exe"
or similar.  I am not entirely sure this will work due to the space
in the path, which could be problematic.  It will probably be easier
to add XEmacs to your PATH.

> So copied the files to
>   
> C:\Program Files\XEmacs\XEmacs-21.4.6\i586-pc-win32
> 
>  .ie, the directory where xemacs.exe is kept.

Good gracious, don't clutter up your directories like that.  See above.

>  Xemacs and AuCtex was deteted
> now but not ghostview.

GhostScript, you mean.

> The following error is seen.
> 
> checking for gs... NONE
> configure: error: gs not found!  Aborting!
> You must install Ghostscript for preview to work
> 
> > Another point worth noting is that the installation tries looking for
> > GhostScript under the name "gs".  While preview-latex's Lisp code can
> > be configured to look for a different name, making an appropriate
> > link to what may be called gswin32 or similar is probably the easiest
> > way to achieve that.
> 
> 	What you say above seems to be the problem. If I change the
> following line in config.ini
> 
> AC_PATH_PROG_REQUIRED(GS, gs, [gs not found!  Aborting!  
> You must install Ghostscript for preview to work.])
> 
> to detect gswin32.exe will it work?

The above line is just a check: GhostScript is not needed during the
installation.  You can delete it completely if you know what you are doing.

> How do I give a link to gswin32.exe. 

Well, it is supposed to be just point and click or something in your
explorer or such.  Sorry, since I switched away from Microsoft before
Windows-1.0 was released, I really have no clue.  You should have
more experience in that regard than I have.

> My path for gs is C:\gs\gs7.03\bin 

Sigh.  An outdated version of AFPL GhostScript, to boot.  We have had
a problem report with AFPL GhostScript 7.04, so I would guess that
7.03 would probably be equally affected.  Upgrade to either GNU
GhostScript 7.05 or AFPL GhostScript 8.0.

If you do the latter, after fudging the install as above (but I
really would recommend creating that link, it can't be so hard) you
would have to do
M-x load-library RET preview RET
M-x customize-variable RET preview-gs-command RET
enter your GhostScript executable name and Save for Future Sessions.

But I would rather make sure that you can call GhostScript just by
saying gs: this could save you trouble with other packages and
upgrades later on.

By the way: the bug reporting address for preview-latex is, as
mentioned in the docs, preview-latex-bugs@lists.sourceforge.net.
Once you have installed a basic set,
M-x load-library RET preview RET
M-x preview-report-bug RET
can be used for submitting bug reports.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum