[Bug-AUCTeX] 11.84; Preview does not create preview in Emacs.app on Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger)

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Peter Dyballa writes:
 > While GNU Emacsen, the X clients, and Carbon Emacsen have no problem  
 > to create a preview from a mathematical formula, this fails in  
 > Emacs.app, the Cocoa port of GNU Emacs 23.0.60 (http://emacs- 
 > app.sourceforge.net/). Preview hides that Ghostscript fails.  
 > Observing preview-region with ktrace I can see that Ghostscript when  
 > invoked from Emacs.app fails with an error:
 > 
 >         "Error: /typecheck in --setmatrix--

Hi,
Peter, you recently said that debugging PostScript is so much easier
than debugging Elisp.

Seriously, if this is a GS problem, the first thing to do is to try
older or newer versions.  It's a well known fact that some versions
are less stable than others.  If you have some experience with this
stuff it would be nice if you can verify whether there is a bug in GS.

At the moment I'm preparing a GS-Win32 package for TeX Live based on
gs-8.60.  I don't insist on the latest release, I need the most stable
one and I need feedback from users.

Regarding auctex, I'm not sure but I remember that I have seen error
messages produced by ghostscript.  Don't know why Peter doesn't see
them.  On the other hand it is too long ago to make reliable
statements.  However, a good thing would be if auctex evaluates the
exit status of the ghostscript process and produces its own error
message if it's !=0.

At the moment we are discussing how to provide GS for Windows in TeX
Live 2008.  There is always the problem what to do with versions of
Perl and GS already installed on the system.  For Perl we have a very
nice solution now.  We provide a Perl which is not really installed
(not in PATH and PERL5LIB not set in the environment) but we provide
wrapper scripts for all programs we provide which set PATH and
PERL5LIB locally and avoid a lot of problems with already installed
stuff.

We consider to do the same with GS, too.  But then it is not
sufficient to copy the GS batch files to bin/win32, we have to replace
them by wrapper scripts.  The question is: What is needed by auctex?

As far as I can see it depends on pdf2dsc, at least.  If more is
needed, please let me know.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-4592165
Marschnerstr. 25
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