[tex-live] preview.sty / tlmgr vs AucTeX

[Axel E. Retif]

On  9 Mar, 2010, at 06:27, George N. White III wrote:

> [...]
> I think the key point here is that AucTeX source installer (e.g.,
> configure) should assume preview.sty may have been installed by the
> TeX distro or some package manager.

Yes, I think that's the ideal, but also to check which is newer.

> Certainly configure can do some tests for an existing preview.sty, but there are potential problems:
> 
> 1.  some other uses of preview.sty might break when a newer version is installed

The same with tlmgr.

> 
> 2.  [...].
> 
> I would prefer that the default with "configure; make ; make install"
> be "--without-texmf"

Oh!... How embarrassing! So this is how it is done! How fool of me not to have read the small ``If you use the `--without-texmf-dir' option...'' paragraph.

Indeed, I tried on my Mac and it installed everything in site-lisp, including preview.sty et al. in .../site-lisp/latex, and typesetting and previewing show it's using the installed files:

(/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/site-lisp/auctex/latex/preview.sty
(/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/site-lisp/auctex/latex/prtightpage.
def)


> [...]
> A number of people who abandoned TeX over a decade ago, in part because latex
> sources are "hard to read",  have expressed surprise when they see a document
> loaded in a modern emacs environment with auctex.

No question about it --it's really beautiful and *so* easy to read!

Best,

Axel