Re: [Bug-AUCTeX] preview-1.287; Installation warns about impossibilities

[Tassilo Horn]

Reinhard Kotucha <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Reinhard,

>  > > BTW, there is rarely a need to install Ghostscript explicitly.
>  > > On Unix systems it's ubiquitous anyway, MacTeX provides
>  > > Ghostscript, and both, TeXLive and MikTeX provide a "hidden" (not
>  > > in PATH) Ghostscript for Windows.
>  > 
>  > Oh, good to know.  Now preview.el tries rungs, mgs, GSWIN32C.EXE,
>  > and gs in that order.  Before, on windows it always required
>  > GSWIN32C.EXE, else gs.
>
> thanks.  However, I'm not sure anymore about mgs.  I don't have
> Windows and can't test anything myself.  But I googled a bit today and
> found a few nasty things.  It seems that mgs.exe is not a wrapper but
> just a re-named gswin32c.exe.  This means that it uses compile-time
> search paths for Ghostscript's lib and fonts directories unless you
> set environment variables.
>
> This is bad because every program using mgs has to be adapted.  Even
> if mgs -help works properly, one can't conclude that anything else
> works because the interpreter isn't initialized if you only ask for
> the help message.  A better test is to run mgs without any arguments.
> It might complain that gs_init.ps cannot be found.
>
>   http://blog.miktex.org/category/MiKTeX-How-To.aspx

Now mgs is only chosen if it's in PATH and

    $ mgs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH

returns a zero exit code.  I've tested that on one windows box where mgs
is configured correctly, but I have none where you get the cited error,
so I'm not completely sure it returns non-zero then...

Bye,
Tassilo