[TxMt] Announcing LaTeX Watch 2.0, with PDF support

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Apr 5, 2007, at 7:49 AM, Robin Houston wrote:

> This new version uses PDFTeX by default, and will try to use  
> TeXShop as the previewer.
> (Note that TeXShop is part of MacTeX 2007.)

Have you looked at PDFView? http://pdfview.sourceforge.net/

> The bundle is available (for the moment) here:
>
>    http://www.puffinry.demon.co.uk/LaTeX%20Watch%202.0.dmg
>
> This version should be almost ready to be incorporated into the  
> LaTeX bundle, so please let
> me know about any problems.
>
> The default behaviour can be changed by setting shell variables, as  
> follows:
>
> 1. If TM_LATEX_VIEWER=TeXniscope, it will use TeXniscope instead of  
> TeXShop
>     (If you should happen to want LaTeX Watch to use a different  
> previewer from 'Compile and View',
>     you can set TM_LATEX_WATCH_VIEWER=TeXShop to override the  
> TM_LATEX_VIEWER setting.)

Is this TM_LATEX_WATCH_VIEWER variable really necessary?

> 2. If TM_LATEX_WATCH_MODE=PS, then it will compile via DVI, and use  
> GV to preview.
>
> 3. If TM_LATEX_WATCH_DEBUG=console, additional status messages will  
> be printed to the console;
>     if TM_LATEX_WATCH_DEBUG=dialog, these status messages will pop  
> up in dialog boxes.

Is there any way we can cut down on all those environment variables?  
The LaTeX bundle already uses more than it should. 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?

And for the debug options, perhaps simply have only one: enabled or  
disabled? And simply force them to be on the console?

> Incidentally, there is a utility in Support/bin/check_open that may  
> be more generally useful.
> It uses the Carbon API to check whether a particular document is  
> open in a particular application.
> (This is used to stop watching the document when you close its  
> preview window.) Of course
> the same thing could be done with AppleScript, but that is too  
> slow. (Another alternative
> would be to use the Perl-Carbon bindings that are included in 10.4,  
> but that would not work on
> earlier OS versions.)
>
> Since it's a bit of a pain to install GV, and since several widely- 
> distributed versions have
> irritating bugs, I wondered about including a GV binary in the  
> package. As an experiment,
> I built gv-3.5.8 as a universal binary with libXaw3d statically  
> linked in, and it comes to
> about 3MB. Does anyone have an opinion on this?

The size is considerable. Perhaps we can just add instructions for  
installing it on the help page, or just make the above binary  
available somewhere?

What is the license on gv btw?

> Robin
>

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College