Re: DocView: process ps->pdf changed status to killed.

[Tassilo Horn]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> The text contents of the document are opened in a separate buffer, not
>> in the buffer of the original document.  By doing the conversion
>> synchronously the switching back from doc-view-mode to, say, ps-mode in
>> the original buffer is deferred until that conversion has finished (and
>> thus all the doc-view buffer local variables aren't needed anymore).
>
> Ah, then it sounds like the problem might be that the pdf2text process
> should not be linked to the main buffer but only to the new "text view"
> buffer (so that switching back to ps-mode in the main buffer wouldn't
> affect the process)

Well, yes, in theory.  The ps/pdftotext conversion works like:

  1. Convert to text by usual doc-view conversion machinery.

  2. (find-file "doc.txt")

Step 1 may involve more than just the pdftotext process, i.e., non-PDF
files have to be converted to PDF first.  We already have the relevant
doc-view-*->pdf functions for that, but all of them (or their sentinels)
access buffer-local doc-view-* variables.  And that's fine except in the
case when we want the process (or chain of processes) to continue
although we're going to switch back the main buffer from doc-view-mode
to whatever mode we've been in before.

Bye,
Tassilo