Re: [AUCTeX-devel] [gs-devel] Asking help for preview-latex

[Ken Sharp]

Good Morning Keita,

At 00:06 21/06/2019 +0900, Ikumi Keita wrote:

> > For example, if the PDF file uses black, and the Emacs current colour
> > is (eg) green, then you want the PDF rendered as green.
>
> That's right.
>
> > So I'm going to assume this is some highly limited application of PDF
> > and Ghostscript where you can guarantee that the PDF file only uses
> > the default colour space and colour and never sets any other colours.
>
> Thanks for summarising, it looks sensible to me.

I needed to make sure that the problem I was looking at was what you needed 
to be addressed :-)

At the moment, I cannot see any way to achieve this. What you are doing 
with the PDF interpreter is pretty much exactly the sort of thing we have 
spent time preventing. We really don't want people to be able to modify the 
PDF interpreter at all.

Not only have we removed access to the dictionary that your code tries to 
write to, we've made it read-only, and made its parent dictionary read-only 
as well.

So basically there's no way to allow you to modify the interpreter, and 
we'd be pretty reluctant to open any back doors for you because, obviously, 
that simply negates the security altogether.

The way the PDF interpreter works at present it follows the spec, it sets 
up the initial colour space to be DeviceGray and the initial colour to be 
100% black.

We can't alter that, because if we did files which conform to the 
specification would not render correctly.

I've tried a number of different alternatives but none of them work due, 
essentially,  to the fact that we've taken steps to prevent users doing 
exactly what you're trying to do.

Before I say definitively I want to discuss this with one of my colleagues 
who is on vacation today and Monday, so it'll be Tuesday before I get back 
to it. However I don't want to hold out any false hope; I don't think 
there's any way to do what you want at present, and I'm certain that nobody 
is going to be in favour of undoing the security changes.

Is it not possible to alter the production of the PDF file in the first place ?

In step 1 you create the PDF file by using pdflatex. That's not a process 
I'm familiar with, but it seems to me that if you want to render the PDF 
file with something other than the default media colour (white) and default 
stroke/fill colour (black) then you should create the PDF file that way.

Then Ghostscript would render the PDF file in the colours you want.



                    Regards,

                        Ken Sharp