On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, David Kastrup uploaded a new version of preview-latex to CTAN.

Location on CTAN: macros/latex/contrib/preview, support/preview-latex License: gpl

Here are the release notes:

Release notes for version 0.9.1 of the preview-latex package:

preview-latex makes LaTeX a tightly integrated component of your editing workflow by visualizing selected source chunks (such as single formulas or graphics) directly as images in the source buffer. You get to have your eye candy and edit it, too.

The employed style file preview.sty is independently useful for extraction of selected text elements as images.

The package is released under the GNU Public License (GPL) and can be downloaded from URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/auctex/ as a tarball or as RPM files. At the current point of time, at least GNU Emacs-21.3 under the X window system or XEmacs-21 in version 21.4.10 or later, AUCTeX (11.51 or later required for PDF support), a working LaTeX installation and GhostScript are required. dvipng[1] (version 1.4 or later: teTeX-3.0 works, TeXlive2004 not), a very fast dvi converter, can be used to speed up the conversion. For Windows[2], MacOS Carbon[3] or native GTK+ toolkit support[4], a developer version[5] of GNU Emacs (to be released as 22.1) is definitely required; for other platforms, use of it is advantageous.

The installation procedure has been further improved: more configurations should now be detected automatically. It is strongly recommended that you remove any previous installation before installing this version to avoid keeping conflicting or unnecessary files. In particular version 0.9 has been known to install into strange (but working) places at times and will likely render later installed versions inoperative.

The quality of multibyte and image support in the current implementations and the responsiveness of the developers to problem reports does not recommend the use of XEmacs at the current point of time.

The encoding support of preview-latex has been refined: the run buffer will now yield readable output again in most situations where it can be reasonably expected to do so.

The installation no longer requires Makeinfo or Perl as long as you don't touch source files: precompiled documentation is included in the distribution by default and no longer available as a separate archive.

The README file provides adequate information for firing up preinstalled distributions, and pointers how to provide feedback. The INSTALL file contains a special section with advice for package providers. There is also a file INSTALL.windows detailing instructions for users of that operating system.

preview-latex has now been moved into the AUCTeX project. As a consequence, its web site has become URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/#preview-latex, the project page (with browsable CVS repository) is that of AUCTeX at URL:http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/auctex. Starting with release 11.80, preview-latex will come bundled with AUCTeX.

If you can spare the time, you can also comment on or rate this project at URL:http://freshmeat.net/projects/preview-latex.

Paypal donations to the maintainer are possible directly or via SourceForge.

Footnotes: [1] dvipng is currently available via its current project page URL:http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/dvipng and from CTAN.

[2] You can get a precompiled version of CVS Emacs for Windows at URL:http://nqmacs.sourceforge.net.

[3] URL:http://members.shaw.ca/akochoi-emacs/stories/faq.html contains build instructions.

[4] For Debian, precompiled GTK+ Emacs packages can be found at URL:http://sadleder.de/debian/, for Fedora at URL:http://people.redhat.com/petersen/emacs/.

[5] If making use of the precompiled variants is not an option for you, instructions for checking out the CVS version straight from the GNU's mouth can be found at URL:http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=emacs

Thanks for the update.

For the CTAN Team Rainer Schöpf