Re: doc-view.el --- View PDF/PostScript/DVI files in Emacs

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

Hi David,

> Have you tried out preview-latex (integrated with AUCTeX since version
> 11.80)?  It displays images in Emacs buffers without blocking Emacs at
> all, and renders stuff in the background with a focus on material that
> is on-screen.

I had a look at it but it didn't look that borrowing code there would
simplify doc-view.el.

> It works using Ghostscript on either PDF or PostScript files (in the
> latter case, dvips is used) or dvipng on DVI files.

I changed doc-view.el so that it uses plain ghostscript (plus dvipdfm
for DVI files) which gives good results and is about ten times faster
than with ImageMagick's convert.

The only downside is that I don't know how to cut off the margins.
Those waste a lot of buffer space when displaying the image.  converts
-trim option was very nice for that cause.  Do you know how one can do
that with ghostview?

> Ghostscript is used as a daemon in order to render the stuff in a
> useful order, and a single Ghostscript session renders all images.

Well, the conversion in doc-view.el runs asynchronous, too.  Users can
go on with their work and eventually the *DocView* buffer will pop up.

Bye,
Tassilo