Re: Why does LilyPond delete the PDF first?

[Risto Vääräniemi]

2008/6/11 Wilbert Berendsen :
> Hi, in scm/backend-library there is (line 114-115):
>
>    (if (access? pdf-name W_OK)
>        (delete-file pdf-name))
>
> Why is the PDF deleted (instead of just truncated on write)? It breaks the PDF
> watching feature of KDE, because KDE looses the watch on the file because it
> is deleted. When the file is recreated, it has a different inode number, and
> other attributes on the former PDF are lost as well.

Commenting those lines creates a lot of ugly error messages on
Windoze. If a PDF is open e.g. on an Acrobat Reader the LP usually
just complains that the pdf file cannot be deleted and therefore
cannot be re-created.

With this modification Ghostscript tries to open the file but cannot
because it's locked. I got a lot of programming errors saying: Parsed
object should be dead: static scm_unused_struct*.

I guess Windows (and Acrobat) handles files differently than Linux and
KPDF. Could you test on Linux what happens, if a pdf is opened with
Acrobat (Reader) and you re-compile the file?

-Risto