Node: The LaTeX style file, Next: The Emacs interface, Previous: For advanced users, Up: For advanced users
The main purpose of this package is the extraction of certain environments (most notably displayed formulas) for use in different contexts. While the erstwhile application has been the embedding of those preview fragments into Emacs source buffers under the AUC TeX editing environment, other applications are easily imaginable.
In particular it should be noted that producing EPS files with
Dvips and its derivatives using the -E
option is
not currently well-supported by LaTeX. People make do by fiddling
around with \thispagestyle{empty}
and hoping for the best (namely,
that the specified contents will indeed fit on single pages), and
then trying to guess the baseline of the resulting code and stuff,
but this is at best dissatisfactory. The preview package provides an
easy way to ensure that exactly one page per request gets shipped,
with a well-defined baseline and no page decorations. Thus you can
safely use
dvips -E -i
and get a single EPS file with shrink-wrapped bounding box for every generated image of a LaTeX run.
If your ultimate goal is to produce a set of files in a different
format that can be produced by GhostScript, take a look at the
tightpage
option of the preview package. This will embed the page
dimensions into the PostScript code, obliterating the need to use the
-E -i
options to Dvips. You can then produce all image files with
a single run of GhostScript from a single PostScript file for all
images at once. The tightpage
option requires setting the dvips
option as well.
Various options exist that will pass TeX dimensions and other information about the respective shipped out material (including descender size) into the log file, where external applications might make use of it.
The possibility for generating a whole set of graphics with a single run of LaTeX, Dvips, and GhostScript increases both speed and robustness of applications. It is to be hoped that applications like LaTeX2HTML will be able to make use of this package in future.