[TxMt] Latex Config and backward compatibility questions

[Robin Houston]

On 31/07/07, Brad Miller <bmiller at luther.edu> wrote:
> But, if I make any changes the view does not update.  I get the following
> error in the log:
>
> Use of uninitialized value in system at
> /Users/bmiller/Library/Application
> Support/TextMate/Bundles/Latex.tmbundle/Support/bin/latex_watch.pl
> line 690.

What version of Watch did you use? In the current version (2.5), line
690 is a comment!

> 1.  It feels like there must be a ton of duplicated effort between the
> typeset and view command as implemented in texMate.py and friends and what
> you have done.  texMate.py is pretty modular, and may be able to do much of
> what latex_watch.pl does.

It may well be that some logic is duplicated, and can be factored out.
I suspect there may be less than you think. Have you looked at the
Watch code? Most of it is fairly specific to the monitor-and-update
model used by Watch.

> 2.  I don't understand the limitation about not being able to watch files
> that have the \begin document in an included header file.

Watch needs to be able to distinguish the preamble from the document
body. The preamble is extracted and used to compile a custom format
file (TeX memory dump) which is used to compile the body. This format
is regenerated only when the preamble is changed. If the preamble is
spread across multiple files, it is more complicated to keep track of.
There are any number of ways that this could be improved to some
extent: since I do not know a perfect solution, I thought I would
address such cases as they arise. To date, no one has shown me a "real
world" document that suffers from this problem.

(Incidentally, I did find a cunning solution to *half* the problem:
see the contents of the Support/tex/generic directory in the bundle.)

Robin