Re: [Bug-AUCTeX] 11.86; View problems

[David Kastrup]

Tassilo Horn <address@hidden> writes:

> Michel Verhaegen <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Hi Michel,
>
>>> Could you provide a sample garbage pdf and the latex source it was
>>> compiled from?
>>
>> thanks for your quick response. I enclose an example of a tex input
>> that produces the test.dvi in TextEdit format when pressing the button
>> View in Aquamacs (after succesfully completing the latex translation).
>>
>> Pressing the View button does not produce a .pdf file. Only a .dvi is
>> produced.
>
> Ah, ok.  This means that you/AUCTeX use latex rather than pdflatex for
> compiling.  If you'd like to compile to pdf instead by default, just put
> this into your ~/.emacs.
>
>   (add-hook 'TeX-mode-hook 'TeX-PDF-mode)

That's probably about the worst thing you can do.  It will switch off
PDF mode for everything which PDF mode would otherwise be chosen for and
vice versa.  So it will do what you want only when AUCTeX is without a
clue, and do the wrong thing whenever AUCTeX would know better.

It would make much more sense to do

M-x customize-variable TeX-PDF-mode RET

and set and save PDF mode as default.  That's what the documentation
also states:

 -- Command: TeX-PDF-mode
     (`C-c C-t C-p') This command toggles the PDF mode of AUCTeX, a
     buffer-local minor mode.  You can customize `TeX-PDF-mode' to give
     it a different default.  The default is used when AUCTeX does not
     have additional clue about what a document might want.  This
     option usually results in calling either PDFTeX or ordinary TeX.


-- 
David Kastrup