[Tuglist] preview-latex and pstricks (fwd)

[E. Krishnan]

I'm forwarding a couple of mails from David Kastrup, the author of 
preview-latex. This is the first one.


-- 
Krishnan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 21 May 2002 17:27:26 +0200
From: David Kastrup <David.Kastrup@t-online.de>
To: ekmath@md5.vsnl.net.in
Subject: preview-latex and pstricks


Hello,

having read your letter that Radhakrishnan forwarded to the TUG India
list, I just want to point out that checking the psfixbb option in
preview-default-option-list is quite unnecessary for normal
preview-latex operation of reasonably up-to-date versions.  The
psfixbb option includes /dev/null as a graphic file at opposing
corners of the TeX box in question.  If one is generating EPS files
via DviPS, this makes DviPS include the borders of the TeX box in
question into the Bounding Box of the generated EPS file, in case this
box contains elements (like PStricks graphics) that DviPS does not
understand about.  This still does not deliver correct results in case
rotation or scaling or similar get involved (which DviPS does not
understand anything about either).

For that as well as performance reasons, recent versions of
preview-latex (probably starting with 0.7 or so) do not let DviPS
generate the Bounding Box information in the first place; instead the
relevant information is, depending on the application of the preview
style, either placed appropriately encoded into a single PostScript
file (instead of a number of EPS files), or passed to preview-latex
via a different mechanism.

As a consequence, for the usual operation the psfixbb option has no
more effect other than to slow down processing.

You can also place configurations for a particular project, like
\PreviewEnvironment{pspicture}
into a configuration file prdefault.cfg in the current directory.

Hope this helps,

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
Email: David.Kastrup@t-online.de