Re: [AUCTeX-devel] [gs-devel] Asking help for preview-latex

[Ken Sharp]

Hi Keita,

(or should that be Ikumi ? Please accept an apology if I'm wrong)

I asked this on our IRC channel, but it occurs to me that it may be outside 
working hours for you now, so I'm following up by email.


At 18:47 20/06/2019 +0900, Ikumi Keita wrote:

> In short, Ghostscript stops with error when preview-latex tries to
> adjust the foreground color of the generated image to be the same as
> that of Emacs face.

So essentially what you are saying is that you want the rendered result of 
the PDF file to be in some colour other than the colour which it should be.

For example, if the PDF file uses black, and the Emacs current colour is 
(eg) green, then you want the PDF rendered as green.


The PDF specification offers a rich range of colour spaces and colours, and 
the format allows for objects to be drawn in any of those colours. PDF 
doesn't have a 'foreground' or 'background' colour, every object in the PDF 
file can be a different colour and potentially in different colour spaces.

The code you sent (below) appears only to alter the default colour (and 
colour space) of the PDF file. If the PDF contains any colour 
specifications then the code you have sent won't (unless I'm missing 
something, which is entirely possible) affect that.

So to take a concrete example; if a PDF file used the initial colour to 
draw a letter 'A' then what you would get rendered would be a capital A in 
black. However, if the PDF file set the current colour space to CMYK and 
drew a 'B'  in Magenta, you would get a capital B in magenta.

Your code would affect the first case, causing the A to be rendered in (eg) 
green, but would not affect the second case, the B would still be rendered 
in magenta.


So I'm going to assume this is some highly limited application of PDF and 
Ghostscript where you can guarantee that the PDF file only uses the default 
colour space and colour and never sets any other colours.


> We consider the reason of the problem is that preview-latex relies on
> GS_PDF_ProcSet, which was removed in Ghostscript 9.27, from the
> following three observations:

You really, really should not be patching the internals of the PDF 
interpreter. While this is, obviously, open source software, we regard the 
way the PDF interpreter works as 'private' (in the sense of udocumented), 
rather than a public API of any kind. We can and often will alter the way 
the internals of the PDF interpreter work without notice.

The reason we removed access to the dictionary is due to security concerns. 
You may or may not recall the security flap that Tavis Ormandy started 
(over a year ago) by publishing an exploit to demonstrate remote code 
execution using Ghostscript.

That started us down a long road of hardening the PostScript and PDF 
interpreters to prevent any recurrence. Its quite clear that permitting 
unfettered access to the PDF interpreter allowed malicious software to 
bypass the security in Ghostscript with varying degrees of ease. Obviously 
we don't want to undo any of that work and expose ourselves to potential 
vulnerabilities again.


> Assuming the above consideration is correct, we would appreciate if you,
> the Ghostscript developers, could kindly provide alternate Postscript
> code to achieve the original purpose of preview-latex.  The relevant
> elisp code is:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> (defun preview-pdf-color-string (colors)
>   "Return a string that patches PDF foreground color to work properly."
>   ;; Actually, this is rather brutal.  It will only be invoked in
>   ;; cases, however, where previously it was not expected that
>   ;; anything readable turned up, anyway.
>   (let ((fg (aref colors 1)))
>     (if fg
>     (concat
>     "/GS_PDF_ProcSet GS_PDF_ProcSet dup maxlength dict copy dup begin\
> /graphicsbeginpage{//graphicsbeginpage exec "
>     (mapconcat #'preview-gs-color-value fg " ")
>     " 3 copy rg RG}bind store end readonly store "))))
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> .  What we would like to know is the code (string) to replace the
> "/GS_PDF_ProcSet GS_PDF_ProcSet dup..." part.  Unfortunately, I don't
> understand any Postscript language, but I hope that the above piece of
> code together with the error message attached with this message is
> enough to determine what to do, even without knowledge of elisp.  Please
> note that these codes go through pdf2dsc.

I don't think pdf2dsc is relevant, but its always useful to know.

In order to investigate properly I need a file that I can run through 
Ghostscript, and a Ghostscript command line which will show the difference 
with and without the code above. I can probably invent a command line, but 
not the PDF file.

I believe that if you send me a PDF file which shows a difference, and the 
values substituted by the line '(mapconcat #'preview-gs-color-value fg " 
")' above, I can probably simply render the file with and without that code 
to see what difference it makes.

I can't simply use a random PDF file which I have to hand, as all the ones 
I can find easily set the colour before trying to draw any objects, which 
defeats the use of the code above. Or at least it does for me, but I could 
be doing something wrong.....



                Regards,


                        Ken Sharp