Subject: preview-latex TeX files

From: Reinhard Kotucha <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2019 02:53:54 +0200

Hello everybody,
I assume that the preview-latex TeX files are not shipped with TeX Live
or MiKTeX because they have to be kept in sync with AUCTeX in the
first place.

When I install AUCTeX with "./configure && make && make install" these
files are installed into the current TeX Live installation.  This is
fine if there is only one TeX Live installation but I have all TeX
Live releases as of 2003 installed and thus have to run at least "make
install" on all of them.

Furthermore, I'm using Emacs on various machines and thus I install
local additions in ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp rather than in /usr/local and
use version control (Subversion) in order to keep all my machines in
sync.  You can't imagine how convenient this is.

I'm now wondering whether it's possible to maintain the preview-latex
TeX files within the auctex directory i.e., make auctex/preview-latex
self-contained.  Given that preview-latex makes only sense when
invoked from within Emacs, then the TeX files can be put into the
auctex directory and something like

 (setenv "TEXINPUTS" (concat "<path/to/auctex/preview>:" (getenv "TEXINPUTS")))

makes the files accessible to TeX.  Please note the trailing colon.
It's necessary in order to tell kpathsea to append path components
derived from texmf.cnf.

It works here with

  (setenv "TEXINPUTS"
	(concat "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/auctex/preview:" (getenv "TEXINPUTS")))

and the file preview.sty is found.  For general use it's necessary to
determine the location of the auctex directory in order to set
TEXINPUTS.  In my case the location is static.

Can't we make AUCTeX and preview-latex self-contained (decouple them
from TeX distributions) this way?  I suppose that the semantics of
TEXINPUTS are the same in TeX Live and MiKTeX but testing can't hurt.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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