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Previewing and printing

Ipe offers the possibility to preview and print the current drawing, as it looks after processing by LaTeX. To use this feature, you have to set the LaTeX preamble in the configuration panel, as well as the preview and print commands. The LaTeX preamble should contain the whole LaTeX file up to (and not including) the \begin{document} line. The default preamble is just a \documentclass{article} line. If you want to use preview while using your own TeX macros in the text objects, you will have to include your own macro files in the preamble. Use something like
\documentclass{article}\input{mymacros.tex}
  Once you select a preview or print function from the File menu, Ipe will run LaTeX and dvips on the drawing. You have the choice between previewing/printing a single page (including template) of the document, or processing the full document.

To print the current drawing, Ipe runs LaTeX and dvips to generate a Postscript file, and then calls the print command from the configuration panel to print the generated Postscript file.

For previewing, the behavior is different for the preview page and preview all functions. To preview the full document, Ipe processes it as for printing, but then calls a Postscript previewer like gv or xpsview to view the Postscript file. Again, the preview command has to be set in the configuration panel.

  When Ipe is asked to preview a single page, however, its behavior is somewhat different. Again LaTeX and dvips are run to create a Postscript file, but then Ipe starts up the Ghostscript Postscript interpreter. This Ghostscript process is run in the background, and Ipe connects to it through a pipe. Whenever you select preview again, the previewed image will appear in the already present Ghostscript window. It is possible to maintain some synchronization between the Ipe canvas and the Ghostscript window. This is achieved by setting the Zoom & Pan button in the configuration panel to on. Now, whenever you do a zoom or pan operation in Ipe's canvas, the Ghostscript window will follow the operation. When you edit the canvas, however, what you will see in the Ghostscript window will eventually not reflect the current drawing at all, even if it still follows the zoom and pan operations done within Ipe.

You can remove the Ghostscript window using the function kill preview in the misc menu. You can also kill the Ghostscript window from your window manager.

Note that when the Ghostscript window is created, it has the same size as Ipe's canvas. If you resize the Ipe window, however, the Ghostscript window will not change. You have to kill Ghostscript and start it again to resize it.


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