On Apr 5, 2007, at 9:21 AM, Robin Houston wrote:
On 4/5/07, Charilaos Skiadas skiadas@hanover.edu wrote: Have you looked at PDFView? http://pdfview.sourceforge.net/
Not yet, I'll have a look now. Should be easy to support it. Thanks for pointing it out.
It's basically the viewer we are suggesting at the moment (once I update the help file that is). It has the advantages of TeXniscope along with some other ones of its own, and works on Intels much better.
Is this TM_LATEX_WATCH_VIEWER variable really necessary? [...] Is there any way we can cut down on all those environment variables? The LaTeX bundle already uses more than it should.
Since environment variables are not in limited supply, I take the point to be that configuration should be as simple as possible. Of course I agree, and it would be good to give some thought to the best way of achieving this.
Yeah the point was to make it as simple for the end users as possible.
I thought it might be useful to have the option of using a different previewer for watching than for 'Typeset & View', but perhaps no one would ever want to do that. At the very least, it could be an undocumented option, and we could say that the recommended way to change the viewer is to set TM_LATEX_VIEWER.
Yeah we could have it as an undocumented option.
For instance there is already a TEX_PSTRICKS (hm, we should probably change that to TM_LATEX_PSTRICKS) which tells the LaTeX&View command to switch to going through ps. Perhaps you can use that instead of the TM_LATEX_WATCH_MODE?
Because of the non-standard name, I didn't realise this was an official configuration option. If it is, I agree that the name should be changed!
Well it's semi-official ;) Supporting pstricks and the dvi->ps->pdf route is relatively new and hasn't settled in much. So TEX_PSTRICKS was really at that point just an internal variable defined within the LaTeX&View command, not supposed to be settable by the user really. But we should probably rethink it a fair bit.
I don't think TM_LATEX_PSTRICKS is a very good name either, since it doesn't, fundamentally, have anything to do with PSTricks per se.
Maybe TM_LATEX_POSTSCRIPT, or TM_LATEX_MODE=PS?
I wonder if it is necessary at all. Is that really different than setting the TS-program to "latex" instead of "pdflatex"?
I guess this is the question: Should the user have to specify anything else other than whether they want pdflatex or latex->dvi->ps-
pdf ? Ideally one variable should do the trick, and even that
should only be needed rarely. Question is what it is the user should be deciding on. (and by "user" here I mean the 99% of the users who just want to keep writing and not learn all about obcsure three/four- word variables starting with TM ).
Another problem with this mechanism (apart from the name) is that it's only over-rideable in one direction. If you have set TEX_PSTRICKS, then it is not currently possible to use
%!TEX TS-program = pdflatex
to over-ride that setting.
Hm, that's a bug in the way we do these things currently I would say, the %!TEX directive should probably be taking precedence. Basically the whole setting sniffing method in the Typeset&View command needs a good cleanup. It has been patched so many times that it is somewhat inefficient/buggy atm.
The size is considerable. Perhaps we can just add instructions for installing it on the help page,
Installing it really is a pain, if you're not a programmer, because it depends on a non-standard X library. Unless you do it via fink or something. But then you have to install fink! Even then, fink has a buggy version of gv.
or just make the above binary available somewhere?
That might be an idea. Is there anywhere suitable for it to go?
Yes I meant to make the binary available somewhere, and then link to it from the documentation. I was thinking of someone's webpage. I can put it on my blog somewhere, or you can host in on your homepage.
What is the license on gv btw?
GPL.
Then I am not sure we can actually include it in a bundle that ships with TM, or include it at all for that matter. Can we? (I am a bit clueless when it comes to licenses).
Robin
Haris Skiadas Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hanover College