Re: [AUCTeX] Re: viewing .pdf file

[Ralf Angeli]

* Frederic Andres (2007-02-17) writes:

> Thanks Ralf, it works now! It does open acrobat, but one problem
> remains: indeed, I am used to compiling, then looking at something
> in acrobat, leaving it open and edit stuff in the .tex file then
> compile again and look at the changes in the pdf; here, if I leave
> acrobat open, and I change something, it tells me it can't write on
> the file (I guess because it is already in use) so that if I C-c
> C-v, the pdf is not updtated.
>
> Is there a workaround?

Jesper Harder posted some code for AUCTeX in a Usenet article some
years ago which sent DDE commands to Adobe Reader (Acrobat Reader back
then, I guess) for closing the file and reopening it after being
processed by LaTeX.  Other editors on Windows do stuff like that and
are currently having problems with the latest version of Adobe
Reader.  Therefore I'm not very much inclined to implement this
technique in AUCTeX proper.

With Foxit Reader there is a contender to Adobe Reader which is much
faster and does not drill itself into every wrinkle of Windows.  It
has the advantage of not locking the PDF file.  Unfortunately it lacks
the possibility to refresh the file.  It has, however the possibility
to open a file at a specific page.  So theoretically it could be used
with pdfsync.sty for forward searching which would improve the
handling a bit.  I tried to implement this some time ago.  I wanted to
let the viewer still be invoked through `start' but that didn't seem
to pass the necessary options on to the viewer.  Adapting
`TeX-output-view-style' specifically for Foxit Reader should be
possible without too many problems, though.

Other than that using DVI output and Yap will likely give you a more
pleasent experience at the moment.

> I did check in the manual (which I have
> downloaded in pdf) but, I haven't found anything about that yet.  *
> Installing emacs on windows is not an easy thing.

Huh?  You only have to extract a ZIP archive and put the command
mentioned in AUCTeX's installation instructions into your init file.
That's not particulary difficult.

> I guess I will
> have to dual boot vista and ubuntu sooner than I expected 'cos I
> think the installation under linux is more streamlined.

Well, with Ubuntu you can just do `apt-get install auctex'.  But
depending on the version of Ubuntu you are using this might install an
outdated version of AUCTeX.  If you then want a recent one you will
either have to wait for a new Ubuntu version (assuming the AUCTeX
package shipping with it is the current one) or do the `./configure &&
make && make install' dance bypassing the package system.

Whatever, at least on GNU/Linux there is a decent PDF viewer with
xpdf.

-- 
Ralf