Subject: bug#35571: bug#35696: preview-latex does not work under any Emacs themes and bug#35571: 12.1; Changing foreground breaks previews

From: David Kastrup <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 May 2019 12:42:11 +0200

Ikumi Keita <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi David,
>
>>>>>> David Kastrup <[email-masked]> writes:
>> The usual "oh, we decided change is good and clobbered over the previous
>> API."  Presumably one of the listed hooks can be used instead, possibly
>> mimicking what the mentioned patch does to lib/pdf2dsc.ps .
>
> Are you thinking that it isn't fruitful to follow up the development of
> ghostscript every time incompatible change is introduced?

No since the changes tend to be completely arbitrary.  It's absolutely
not fruitful but exasperating.  That doesn't mean that it's not
necessary.

In this particular case, this is partly related to _not_ using
GhostScript as PDF interpreter but instead using pdftodsc and then
working with the resulting not-quite-standard PostScript.  This
minimises the amount of knowledge and code required to make this work
but necessitates working with interfaces of Ghostscript that its
developers feel no obligation to provide some consistency for.

Changing the operation in a manner foregoing pdftodsc would likely make
preview-latex less vulnerable to this kind of recurring API change.

-- 
David Kastrup