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5.6 LaTeX international characters

To determine the position of a preview, preview-latex correlates error messages from TeX with the input text. The delivered example file circ.tex contains ISO-8859-1 input characters (also called Latin-1). If your language environment is not properly set up, or your TeX version is rather old, TeX will, for example, display ü (German u-Umlaut) as ^^fc. In that case the correlation will fail, with the result that the preview images get misplaced. Personally, I have set the environment variable LANG to the string en_US.ISO8859-1. Your system may have different ways of achieving something similar. If you have a graphical login screen, chances are that it offers a Language setting. It may help to choose US English or similar instead of the plain English setting. This problem has also been reported as being caused by teTeX compiled against libc5 libraries.

configure currently tries checking for an 8-bit-clean configuration of LaTeX and refuses to continue until you have fixed it. If nothing else works and you would not need to have an 8-bit clean installation, pass the option --disable-8bit-test to configure. This will usually result in circ.tex and other files with 8-bit characters not being properly previewed.

As a very last resort, when all of the regular attempts of getting your system recognized as being able to deal with 8-bit characters by the latex executable fail, you might try to use M-x customize-variable on the variable LaTeX-command-style and replace the command latex with latex -translate-file=cp8bit.