[TxMt] LaTeX Bundle question

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Feb 8, 2008, at 3:22 PM, Geoff Vallis wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Brad, to what extent would it be possible to have texMate.py be  
something that people can use as a library? I.e. you would, say,  
import it, and then you could do something like "get_master_filename 
()" etc. So that custom commands could easily take advantage of what  
it can do. Or is this already possible?

> Geoff

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College