[TxMt] LaTeX Watch

Robin Houston robin.houston at gmail.com
Mon Apr 2 18:52:24 UTC 2007


On 4/2/07, Charilaos Skiadas <skiadas at hanover.edu> wrote:
>
> Yes this would be great to see added to the bundle,


That's encouraging!

but we need to
> modularize it a bit first, so that we can make it work with pdflatex
> as well, when ps output is not required.


Sure. I don't know what would be most suitable as a previewer for this –
probably Texniscope?

Also, we need to somehow
> make it so that the watcher stops watching a file that is not open in
> TM anymore. Not sure how to achieve that last one though.


I'm not sure either. Note that it does stop watching when you close the
previewer.

And ideally rewrite it in ruby, so that we can use the dialog.rb
> library instead of all these direct CocoaDialog calls (and so that I
> can actually read it ;) ).


I have no objection to that, and I know some Ruby, but I'm not fluent in it
the way that I am in Perl.

Actually, it's really a question of just speeding up the compile,
> right?


That was my main concern, but I also find it useful to have it updating
quietly in the background whenever you save, rather than having to
explicitly open it afresh every time. That way you can see the effect of
your changes very easily. I don't use Texniscope, because it doesn't work
with PS specials, but I assume that it offers some of the same convenience,
e.g. staying on the same page when the file is recompiled?

Is there really much speed gained in having the recompile done
> automatically instead of triggering it via cmd-R? In other words, is
> the overall speedup mostly in using the ini stuff?
>

For my documents, the overall speedup is overwhelmingly in not generating
PDF from PostScript, which is insanely slow. But after that, the format
caching also roughly halves the time needed (again for my documents, on my
computer. Your mileage may vary).

Apart from convenience, the other reason for having a long-running process
monitoring the file, rather than spawning a new one for every refresh, is
that data can be cached in memory. Currently this is done for the text of
the preamble, so the script can tell when it has changed.

Robin
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