Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: Can AUCTeX be a pseudo-WYSIWYG device?

[Ryszard Kubiak]

Hi Ralf,

Thank you very much for your answer.

> I don't think that hiding the Emacs frame after a tool chain run is a
> good idea, though.  After all, one often wants to change between the
> output and the source.  In that case it is handy having both visible.

The two approaches:

-- TeX and view the results of typesetting,
-- TeX and see if it compiles well or why it does not

are equally important when working with TeX. I personally, and my 
friends who work with TeX too, find hiding Emacs frame very useful.
It frees us from issuing lengthy keyboard sequences again and again,
and helps to concentrate more on the contents of the document under
work. It think it would be nice to equip AUCTeX with an option that
would leave the decision of the style of work to the user.

By the way, to call the very process of the viewer that shows the 
document and not to just hide Emacs would be even better.
It's not easy though and it would depend on both the operating system
and the  viewing program at hand. Hiding Emacs is just a substitute.

Unluckily, the lower-frame function works differently in Linux and
in MS Windows. Emacs Linux lowers frame just one z-level while
on MS Windows the frame goes to the bottom of the stack of windows.
This is why I am distiguishing the code of hiding:

  (if (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (iconify-frame) (lower-frame))

> Sooner or later AUCTeX should be able to execute a full tool chain on
> its own.  This would allow us to use matching process filters and
> sentinels for the different tools.  I'm not sure how well AUCTeX deals
> with something like texify with respect to that.

In AUCTeX, as it is today, a command from TeX-command-list is supposed
to do just one step. There is no function in the code that would do
a list of commands: execute a step, if the results are OK,
do a next one, and so on. For this to work well one needs a good tool
for inspecting the results. The TeX-TeX-sentinel-check function returns
just a boolean value while, it seems to me, it should return a more
informative value, something like: fatal error during TeX-ing, warnings
on unresolved references, warnings on overfulls or underfulls,
everything fine.

Best Regards,
Rysiek