Subject: bug#35791: 12.1.2; Cannot preview anything, Latex found no preview images

From: Reinhard Kotucha <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 May 2019 23:11:57 +0200

On 2019-05-21 at 03:29:57 +0200, Pim Remkes wrote:

 > Hey,
 >
 > I've gotten my setup working now but it took some more trouble then
 > just switching to tex live. After having done this I had issues
 > with the current version of 'rungs' included in tex live 2019. The
 > issues I got were similar to
 > https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=698680 if anyone is
 > interested. I was able to fix this (for now) by making use of
 > 'mgs.exe' included with MiKTeX.

Hi Pim,
you mention the "current version" of 'rungs' but nothing was changed
here for more than a decade.

Let me explain what rungs is and what it does.

Some dvips/dvipdf* configuration files contain ghostscript commands
but the binary is called 'gs' on Unix and 'gswin32c' on Windows.
These configuration files are static and cannot contain conditional
code.  In order to support all platforms I wrote a tiny Lua script
texmf-dist/scripts/texlive/rungs.tlu which executes 'gs' on Unix and
'gswin32c' on Windows and passes all cmdline arguments to the binary.
In so far 'rungs' is just another name for 'gs' or 'gswin32c'.

On Unix, bin/<platform>/rungs is a symbolic link to the Lua script.
On Windows however, the situation is a bit more complicated.  The file
bin/win32/rungs.exe is a generic wrapper which passes its arguments to
bin/win32/runscript.tlu.  The latter adds the Perl and Ghostscript
shipped with TeX Live to PATH and then calls rungs.tlu which executes
gswin32c.

If you are interested in all the gory details, look into
bin/win32/runscript.tlu.  This file contains a detailed description.

I suggested to use mgs and rungs in AUCTeX as well because otherwise
Windows users had to install Ghostscript separately.

rungs.tlu has not been changed for a decade at all.  If rungs and mgs
behave differently, the most likely reason is that MiKTeX provides an
older version of Ghostscript.  TeX Live provides gs-9.27 for a couple
of days.  You can check version numbers with

  rungs -help
  mgs -help

You can also try with the previous release:

Extract

  http://ms25.ddns.net/texlive/w32/ghostscript/tlgs-9.26.tar.xz

in

  texlive/2019/tlpkg

and execute

  rename tlgs tlgs-9.27
  rename tlgs-9.26 tlgs

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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