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2.7 Installation under MS Windows

Installation of preview-latex has been verified to work (in order of increasing operating speed) with current CVS versions of GNU Emacs, and with both Cygwin and native versions of XEmacs. Since various fixes in the installation procedure have been incorporated for Windows lately, you should install the current release of preview-latex.

Ok, here are the steps to perform:

  1. The installation of preview-latex will require the MSYS tool set from http://www.mingw.org. If you have the Cygwin tool set from http://cygwin.com installed, that should do just fine as well, but it is quite larger and slower. If you need to compile Emacs/XEmacs from source, you'll also need compilers and stuff that are also available for both of those tool sets. Compiling Emacs is outside of the scope of this manual: good luck. preview-latex itself does not (yet) require a C compiler for installation. Without either of those tool sets, however, you would need to generate your various Makefile copies from the respective Makefile.in files by hand, and that would mean quite a lot of guesswork. There is no sense going into too much details here: the instructions would change severely between versions, and the above tool sets are easy enough to acquire to make manual configuration unnecessary.
  2. Install a current version of XEmacs (such as 21.4.10) from http://www.xemacs.org or try getting and compiling an CVS version of GNU Emacs from http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=emacs.
  3. You need a working TeX installation. One popular installation under Windows is MikTeX. Another much more extensive system is TeX live which is rather close to its Unix cousins.
  4. Install AUCTeX according to its instructions. It is recommended that you install at least 11.14. At the current point of time this means that you should forego installing AUCTeX from the XEmacs package repository (version 1.35): it is not up to date. If you insist, there are patch instructions for older versions of AUCTeX in Prerequisites.
  5. You need a copy of GhostScript.
  6. Perl is needed for building the documentation. When we release tarballs for preview-latex, we also pregenerate the documentation. If you install the prebuilt-docs tarball over the normal source after configuration is complete, the dependencies for the documentation will be satisfied without needing to run Perl. If you are building preview-latex from CVS, however, you'll need Perl.
  7. Now the fun stuff starts. Unpack the preview-latex distribution into some installation directory. Do not unpack it right into your Emacs' own directories: the installation will copy the material that needs to be placed there. Keep the installation directory separate: you can remove its contents after installation completes. Since you are reading this, you probably have already unpacked preview-latex, but it should still be easy to move it elsewhere now.
  8. Ready for takeoff. Start some shell (typically bash) capable of running configure, change into the installation directory and call ./configure with appropriate options.

    Typical options you'll want to specify will be

    --with-emacs
    if you are installing Emacs. You can use --with-emacs=/path/to/emacs to specify the name of the installed Emacs executable, complete with its path if necessary (if Emacs is not within a directory specified in your PATH environment setting).
    --with-xemacs
    If you are using XEmacs, of course use --with-xemacs in the same manner.
    --with-texmf-dir=dir
    This will specify the directory where your TeX installation sits. If your TeX installation does not conform to the TDS (TeX directory standard), you may need to specify more options to get everything in place. See Configure for more information about the available options.
    --with-lispdir=/dir
    This may be needed for GNU Emacs installation, but hopefully configure should figure this out by itself. Don't use this for XEmacs, rather use
    --with-packagedir=/dir
    which gives the location of the package directory for XEmacs where stuff should be installed. Again, hopefully this is not necessary to specify.

    Some executables might not be found in your path. That is not a good idea, but you can get around by specifying environment variables to configure:

              GS="/path/to/GhostScript" ./configure ...
         

    should work for this purpose.

  9. If you need to use the prebuilt documentation (see above), now is the time to unpack it over the rest of the installation directory.
  10. Run make in the installation directory (we have had one report that Emacs did not manage to byte compile the Elisp files, and that had to be done by hand. No idea about what might have gone wrong there).
  11. Run make install in the installation directory.
  12. The above will leave you with a file preview-latex.el in the installation directory. Emacs must load this on startup. It may be that your version of Emacs already has a place where it keeps such startup files. If not, copy it into a place in your Emacs load-path, then put
              (load "preview-latex.el" nil t t)
         

    into your .emacs file or, if you have more than one user using your system, into the global default.el file.

  13. Load circ.tex into Emacs or XEmacs and see if you can generate previews.

    If this barfs and tells you that image type png is not supported, try adding the line

              (setq preview-image-type 'pnm)
         

    at the end of your installed version of preview-latex.el. If this helps, complain to wherever you got your Emacs: all current Emacs/XEmacs versions capable of running preview-latex by now can be compiled to support PNG images. Which is important, because PNM files take away vast amount of disk space, and thus also of load/save time.

Well, that about is all. Have fun!