AUCTeX region preview in Emacs

Question

I've installed AUCTeX and passed the circ.tex preview, however, when I'm trying to add more elements (enumerate, tabular) to preview with \PreviewEnvironment{..} in the preamble, AUCTeX ignores these lines and render only math, table, sections, and other default elements. I've tried to add custom environments in preview-default-preamble, but no success.

It's probably a part of the same problem, but if I try C-c C-p C-e (preview the environment with a pointer inside this environment), it says no enclosing outer environment found -- a pretty rare error, Google finds it only in preview.el sources.

preview-image-type is set to dvipng (png and gswin32c.exe do not work properly).

Emacs 23.3 and TeX Live 2011 are the counterpart.

Answer 1

Worked through the problem and have three points to stress:

1. \PreviewEnvironment should not work in a tex file's preamble.

2. One way to add custom environments is by adding full \PreviewEnvironment{..} entries after the last string of the default Preview Default Preamble string (expected to be ]{preview}[2004/11/05]). It's equivalent for .emacs: (setq preview-default-preamble (quote ("\\RequirePackage[" ("," . preview-default-option-list) "]{preview}[2004/11/05]" "\\PreviewEnvironment{center}" "\\PreviewEnvironment{enumerate}"))), where center and enumerate are example custom environments. Alternatives are (preview-latex.pdf, p. 11):

   • including custom environments in local file variables
   • a configuration file in the project's directory

3. M-x preview-environment (C-c C-p C-e) works only for the customized environments (see 2) and environments from preview-default-option-list.

Answer 2

Point 1: PreviewEnvironment certainly works in the preamble if preview.sty has been loaded. The AUCTeX component of preview-latex uses \AtBeginDocument for loading it in order to give the document itself a chance to load it with its own individual options.

Point 3: preview-environment most certainly works for any environment, but it likely does something different from what you expect it to do: it runs the region enclosed by the current environment through preview-latex, and everything that would be previewed inside of that region when running the whole document through preview-latex will get freshly previewed.