The main purpose of this package is the extraction of certain environments (most notably displayed formulas) from LaTeX sources as graphics.  This works with DVI files postprocessed by either Dvips and Ghostscript or dvipng, but it also works when you are using PDFTeX for generating PDF files (usually also postprocessed by Ghostscript).

Current uses of the package include the previewlatex package for WYSIWYG functionality in the AUCTeX editing environment, generation of previews in LyX, as part of the operation of the ps4pdf package, the tbook XML system and some other tools.

Producing EPS files with Dvips and its derivatives using the -E option is not a good alternative: 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. While you still can use the preview package with the `classic'

     dvips -E -i

invocation, there are better ways available that don't rely on Dvips not getting confused by PostScript specials.

For most applications, you'll want to make use of the tightpage option.  This will embed the page dimensions into the PostScript or PDF 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 PDF or PostScript (as opposed to EPS) file.

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 Ghostscript (whether from LaTeX or PDFLaTeX) increases both speed and robustness of applications.  It is also feasible to use dvipng on a DVI file with the options

     -picky -noghostscript

to omit generating any image file that requires Ghostscript, then let a script generate all missing files using Dvips/Ghostscript. This will usually speed up the process significantly.

Package options
---------------

The package is included with the customary

     \usepackage[OPTIONS]{preview}

You should usually load this package as the last one, since it redefines several things that other packages may also provide.

The following options are available:

active
     is the most essential option.  If this option is not specified, the preview package will be inactive and the document will be typeset as if the preview package were not loaded, except that all declarations and environments defined by the package are still legal but have no effect.  This allows defining previewing characteristics in your document, and only activating them by calling LaTeX as

          latex '\PassOptionsToPackage{active}{preview} \input{FILENAME}'

noconfig
     Usually the file prdefault.cfg gets loaded whenever the preview package gets activated.  prdefault.cfg is supposed to contain definitions that can cater for otherwise bad results, for example, if a certain document class would otherwise lead to trouble.  It also can be used to override any settings made in this package, since it is loaded at the very end of it. In addition, there may be configuration files specific for certain preview options like auctex which have more immediate needs. The noconfig option suppresses loading of those option files, too.

psfixbb
     Dvips determines the bounding boxes from the material in the DVI file it understands.  Lots of PostScript specials are not part of that.  Since the TeX boxes do not make it into the DVI file, but merely characters, rules and specials do, Dvips might include far too small areas.  The option psfixbb will include /dev/null as a graphic file in the ultimate upper left and lower right corner of the previewed box.  This will make Dvips generate an appropriate bounding box.

dvips
     If this option is specified as a class option or to other packages, several packages pass things like page size information to Dvips, or cause crop marks or draft messages written on pages.  This seriously hampers the usability of previews.  If this option is specified, the changes will be undone if possible.

pdftex
     If this option is set, PDFTeX is assumed as the output driver.  This mainly affects the tightpage option.

xetex
     If this option is set, XeTeX is assumed as the output driver.  This mainly affects the tightpage option.

displaymath
     will make all displayed math environments subject to preview processing.  This will typically be the most desired option.

floats
     will make all float objects subject to preview processing.  If you want to be more selective about what floats to pass through to a preview, you should instead use the \PreviewSnarfEnvironment command on the floats you want to have previewed.

textmath
     will make all text math subject to previews. Since math mode is used throughly inside of LaTeX even for other purposes, this works by redefining \(, \) and $ and the math environment (apparently some people use that).  Only occurences of these text math delimiters in later loaded packages and in the main document will thus be affected.

graphics
     will subject all \includegraphics commands to a preview.

sections
     will subject all section headers to a preview.

delayed
     will delay all activations and redefinitions the preview package makes until \begin{document}.  The purpose of this is to cater for documents which should be subjected to the preview package without having been prepared for it.  You can process such documents with

          latex '\RequirePackage[active,delayed,OPTIONS]{preview}
          \input{FILENAME}'

     This relaxes the requirement to be loading the preview package as last package.

DRIVER
     loads a special driver file prDRIVER.def.  The remaining options are implemented through the use of driver files.

auctex
     This driver will produce fake error messages at the start and end of every preview environment that enable the Emacs package previewlatex in connection with AUCTeX to pinpoint the exact source location where the previews have originated. Unfortunately, there is no other reliable means of passing the current TeX input position in a line to external programs.  In order to make the parsing more robust, this option also switches off quite a few diagnostics that could be misinterpreted.

     You should not specify this option manually, since it will only be needed by automated runs that want to parse the pseudo error messages.  Those runs will then use \PassOptionsToPackage in order to effect the desired behaviour.  In addition, prauctex.cfg will get loaded unless inhibited by the noconfig option.  This caters for the most frequently encountered problematic commands.

showlabels
     During the editing process, some people like to see the label names in their equations, figures and the like.  Now if you are using Emacs for editing, and in particular previewlatex, I'd strongly recommend that you check out the RefTeX package which pretty much obliterates the need for this kind of functionality.  If you still want it, standard LaTeX provides it with the showkeys package, and there is also the less encompassing showlabels package.  Unfortunately, since those go to some pain not to change the page layout and spacing, they also don't change preview's idea of the TeX dimensions of the involved boxes.  So if you are using preview for determing bounding boxes, those packages are mostly useless.  The option showlabels offers a substitute for them.

tightpage
     It is not uncommon to want to use the results of preview as graphic images for some other application.  One possibility is to generate a flurry of EPS files with

          dvips -E -i -Pwww -o OUTPUTFILE.000 INPUTFILE

     However, in case those are to be processed further into graphic image files by Ghostscript, this process is inefficient since all of those files need to be processed one by one.  In addition, it is necessary to extract the bounding box comments from the EPS files and convert them into page dimension parameters for Ghostscript in order to avoid full-page graphics.  This is not even possible if you wanted to use Ghostscript in a single run for generating the files from a single PostScript file, since Dvips will in that case leave no bounding box information anywhere.

     The solution is to use the tightpage option.  That way a single command line like

          gs -sDEVICE=png16m -dTextAlphaBits=4 -r300
          -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dSAFER -q -dNOPAUSE
          -sOutputFile=OUTPUTFILE%d.png INPUTFILE.ps

     will be able to produce tight graphics from a single PostScript file generated with Dvips without use of the options -E -i, in a single run.

     The tightpage option actually also works when using the pdftex option and generating PDF files with PDFTeX.  The resulting PDF file has separate page dimensions for every page and can directly be converted with one run of Ghostscript into image files.

     If neither dvips or pdftex have been specified, the corresponding option will get autodetected and invoked.

     If you need this in a batch environment where you don't want to use preview's automatic extraction facilities, no problem: just don't use any of the extraction options, and wrap everything to be previewed into preview environments.  This is how LyX does its math previews.

     If the pages under the tightpage option are just too tight, you can adjust by setting the length \PreviewBorder to a different value by using \setlength.  The default value is 0.50001bp, which is half of a usual PostScript point, rounded up.  If you go below this value, the resulting page size may drop below 1bp, and Ghostscript does not seem to like that.  If you need finer control, you can adjust the bounding box dimensions individually by changing the macro \PreviewBbAdjust with the help of \renewcommand.  Its default value is

          \newcommand \PreviewBbAdjust
          {-\PreviewBorder -\PreviewBorder
          \PreviewBorder  \PreviewBorder}

     This adjusts the left, lower, right and upper borders by the given amount.  The macro must contain 4 TeX dimensions after another, and you may not omit the units if you specify them explicitly instead of by register.  PostScript points have the unit bp.

lyx
     This option is for the sake of LyX developers.  It will output a few diagnostics relevant for the sake of LyX' preview functionality (at the time of writing, mostly implemented for math insets, in versions of LyX starting with 1.3.0).

counters
     This writes out diagnostics at the start and the end of previews.  Only the counters changed since the last output get written, and if no counters changed, nothing gets written at all.  The list consists of counter name and value, both enclosed in {} braces, followed by a space.  The last such pair is followed by a colon (:) if it is at the start of the preview snippet, and by a period (.) if it is at the end.  The order of different diagnostics like this being issued depends on the order of the specification of the options when calling the package.

     Systems like previewlatex use this for keeping counters accurate when single previews are regenerated.

footnotes
     This makes footnotes render as previews, and only as their footnote symbol.  A convenient editing feature inside of Emacs.

The following options are just for debugging purposes of the package and similar to the corresponding TeX commands they allude to:

tracingall
     causes lots of diagnostic output to appear in the log file during the preview collecting phases of TeX's operation.  In contrast to the similarly named TeX command, it will not switch to \errorstopmode, nor will it change the setting of \tracingonline.

showbox
     This option will show the contents of the boxes shipped out to the DVI files.  It also sets \showboxbreadth and \showboxdepth to their maximum values at the end of loading this package, but you may reset them if you don't like that.

Provided commands
-----------------

\begin{preview}...\end{preview}
     The preview environment causes its contents to be set as a single preview image.  Insertions like figures and footnotes (except those included in minipages) will typically lead to error messages or be lost.  In case the preview package has not been activated, the contents of this environment will be typeset normally.

\begin{nopreview}...\end{nopreview}
     The nopreview environment will cause its contents not to undergo any special treatment by the preview package.  When preview is active, the contents will be discarded like all main text that does not trigger the preview hooks.  When preview is not active, the contents will be typeset just like the main text.

     Note that both of these environments typeset things as usual when preview is not active.  If you need something typeset conditionally, use the \ifPreview conditional for it.

\PreviewMacro
     If you want to make a macro like \includegraphics (actually, this is what is done by the graphics option to preview) produce a preview image, you put a declaration like

          \PreviewMacro[*[[!]{\includegraphics}

     or, more readable,

          \PreviewMacro[{*[][]{}}]{\includegraphics}

     into your preamble.  The optional argument to \PreviewMacro specifies the arguments \includegraphics accepts, since this is necessary information for properly ending the preview box.  Note that if you are using the more readable form, you have to enclose the argument in a [{ and }] pair.  The inner braces are necessary to stop any included [] pairs from prematurely ending the optional argument, and to make a single {} denoting an optional argument not get stripped away by TeX's argument parsing.

     The letters simply mean

     *
          indicates an optional * modifier, as in \includegraphics*.

     [
          ^^A] indicates an optional argument in brackets.  This syntax is somewhat baroque, but brief.

     []
          also indicates an optional argument in brackets.  Be sure to have encluded the entire optional argument specification in an additional pair of braces as described above.

     !
          indicates a mandatory argument.

     {}
          indicates the same.  Again, be sure to have that additional level of braces around the whole argument specification.

     ?DELIMITER{TRUE CASE}{FALSE CASE}
          is a conditional.  The next character is checked against being equal to DELIMITER.  If it is, the specification TRUE CASE is used for the further parsing, otherwise FALSE CASE will be employed.  In neither case is something consumed from the input, so {TRUE CASE} will still have to deal with the upcoming delimiter.

     @{LITERAL SEQUENCE}
          will insert the given sequence literally into the executed call of the command.

     -
          will just drop the next token.  It will probably be most often used in the true branch of a ? specification.

     #{ARGUMENT}{REPLACEMENT}
          is a transformation rule that calls a macro with the given argument and replacement text on the rest of the argument list.  The replacement is used in the executed call of the command.  This can be used for parsing arbitrary constructs.  For example, the [] option could manually be implemented with the option string ?[{#{[#1]}{[{#1}]}}{}. PStricks users might enjoy this sort of flexibility.

     :{ARGUMENT}{REPLACEMENT}
          is again a transformation rule.  As opposed to #, however, the result of the transformation is parsed again.  You'll rarely need this.

     There is a second optional argument in brackets that can be used to declare any default action to be taken instead.  This is mostly for the sake of macros that influence numbering: you would want to keep their effects in that respect.  The default action should use #1 for referring to the original (not the patched) command with the parsed options appended.  Not specifying a second optional argument here is equivalent to specifying [#1].

\PreviewMacro*
     A similar invocation \PreviewMacro* simply throws the macro and all of its arguments declared in the manner above away.  This is mostly useful for having things like \footnote not do their magic on their arguments.  More often than not, you don't want to declare any arguments to scan to \PreviewMacro* since you would want the remaining arguments to be treated as usual text and typeset in that manner instead of being thrown away.  An exception might be, say, sort keys for \cite.

     A second optional argument in brackets can be used to declare any default action to be taken instead.  This is for the sake of macros that influence numbering: you would want to keep their effects in that respect.  The default action might use #1 for referring to the original (not the patched) command with the parsed options appended.  Not specifying a second optional argument here is equivalent to specifying [] since the command usually gets thrown away.

     As an example for using this argument, you might want to specify

          \PreviewMacro*\footnote[{[]}][#1{}]

     This will replace a footnote by an empty footnote, but taking any optional parameter into account, since an optional paramter changes the numbering scheme.  That way the real argument for the footnote remains for processing by previewlatex.

\PreviewEnvironment
     The macro \PreviewEnvironment works just as \PreviewMacro does, only for environments.  \PreviewEnvironment* And the same goes for \PreviewEnvironment* as compared to \PreviewMacro*.

\PreviewSnarfEnvironment
     This macro does not typeset the original environment inside of a preview box, but instead typesets just the contents of the original environment inside of the preview box, leaving nothing for the original environment.  This has to be used for figures, for example, since they would

      1. produce insertion material that cannot be extracted to the preview properly,

      2. complain with an error message about not being in outer par mode.

\PreviewOpen

\PreviewClose
     Those Macros form a matched preview pair.  This is for macros that behave similar as \begin and \end of an environment.  It is essential for the operation of \PreviewOpen that the macro treated with it will open an additional group even when the preview falls inside of another preview or inside of a nopreview environment.  Similarly, the macro treated with PreviewClose will close an environment even when inactive.

\ifPreview
     In case you need to know whether preview is active, you can use the conditional \ifPreview together with \else and \fi.