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Requirements

B.2.1 Which version of Emacs is needed?

preview-latex nominally requires GNU Emacs with a version of at least 28.1.

B.2.2 Which versions of Ghostscript and AUCTeX are needed?

We recommend to use GNU or AFPL Ghostscript with a version of at least 7.07.

preview-latex has been distributed as part of AUCTeX since version 11.80. If your version of AUCTeX is older than that, or if it does not contain a working copy of preview-latex, complain to wherever you got it from.

B.2.3 I have trouble with the display format...

We recommend keeping the variable preview-image-type set to dvi* (if you have dvipng or dvisvgm installed) or png. This is the default and can be set via the ‘Preview/Customize’ menu.

All other formats are known to have inconveniences, either in file size or quality. There are some Emacs versions around not supporting PNG; the proper way to deal with that is to complain to your Emacs provider. Short of that, checking out PNM or JPEG formats might be a good way to find out whether the lack of PNG format support might be the only problem with your Emacs.

B.2.4 For which OS does preview work?

It is known to work under the X Window System for Linux and for several flavors of Unix: we have reports for HP and Solaris.

There are several versions of Emacs around for macOS, and preview-latex is working with them, too.

With Windows, both native Emacs and Cygwin Emacs should work. However, it is known that MiKTeX sometimes doesn’t work with preview-latex. In that case, use TeX Live instead.