preview requirements

[PaulSoderlind]

Hi,
"preview" used to work on my computer (Win 7, MiKTeX64, latest Sublime 3 dev), but then something happened in mid May.

After a bit of digging, I understood that I need to install the following packages: standalone and preview (yes, I knew that already), but also LuaTeX85, xcolor and mathtools. Now it works again.

May I suggest that you list these requirements in the installation instructions? (Depending on how you configure MiKTeX and what type of user account you have, you may or may not get prompted to install these.) A list would simplify things.

Besides, thanks for a nice package. /Paul S

[r-stein]

If you run a system check (C-shift-p > "LaTeXTools: Check System") it will also check the available packages. Aside from that by default the only required package are standalone and preview (+ amsmath and amssymb). The packages xcolor, latexsym, and mathtools are recommended, but optional (we include them via \IfFileExists{xcolor.sty}{\usepackage{xcolor}}{}). If you don't have the packages installed there should be a phantom with the buttons Check System, Show Report, and Disable which hopefully help the users to debug the problem on their own.

However I agree, that we should also add that to the installation instruction.

[PaulSoderlind]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Just three small remarks:

(1) As far as I can see, a system check does not give any info on installed LaTeX packages.
(2) Somehow, the preview failed without the recommended packages, and then worked once I've installed them.
(3) "there should be a phantom with the buttons Check System, Show Report, and Disable". Yes, indeed. The report was eventually helpful, but in a round about way. The way I (sort of) solved this was by extracting the "document" part of the report and then tried to compile that. That produced a number of error messages pointing to the packages.

/Paul

[r-stein]

It seems that the condition to show the required packages is outdated and it is only triggered if "magick is installed" instead of if "ghostscript is installed". We hat some optimizations to eliminate that dependency (AFAIK it is now only necessary to preview SVG images), but didn't change the system check (I will fix that).

Yes, the report is not the best way to see the problem and just contains all available information to help the user. In general the system check should already be enough to solve the issue.