[TxMt] LaTeX Bundle question

[Geoff Vallis]

On Feb 8, 2008, at 2:38 PM, Brad Miller wrote:
>
> I've put xdvi support on my todo list for a future texMate.py  
> release.  I think I would prefer to make texMate smart enough that  
> if xdvi is the viewer the dvips step is skipped.  That would keep  
> all the other options and preferences intact without creating  
> another shortcut.
>
> My one concern about this path going forward is that latex itself  
> seems more and more insistent on producing pdf output.  I tried a  
> couple of old documents yesterday  and even using the -output- 
> format=dvi option latex still created a pdf file for me.

I agree that PDF is more common, and may be the way forward, at least  
on the Mac. However, xdvi is actually a nice piece of software.

But I'm surprised that you get pdf output when using 'latex'. Under  
texlive 2007, latex and pdflatex are both symbolic links to pdftex,  
and pdftex parses the calling command to decide whether a dvi or pdf  
file is produced, unless overruled by 'output-format'. In the past, a  
line at the top of the file like %pdflatex was sometimes used to  
indicate the format output, and it might be causing trouble if still  
there.

Geoff