� wrote:

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Hans Hagen wrote:

...

...

now I see, that my problem with HZ is only in DVI mode, PDFs are ok.

hz in dvi probably forces you to create the font instances yourself as this happens automatically in pdf mode; a good time to kiss dvi goodbey

The only reason why I still keep asking for dvi, is the good xdvi viewer. If there is something similar for pdf, then yes: you can drop dvi support!Cheers, Peter

acrobat is rather convenient and i use it all day; i haven't touched a dvi viewer this milenium

Hans

----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

I tend to use kpdf more than AR now; it's faster and watches files.

That's probably the biggest pain with most PDF viewers, not watching files; at any rate it's what I miss the most now I'm using XeTeX as my main TeX engine. What other viewers do you know watch files?

Hi Arthur,

(old question, but may be of interest to others)

That's probably the biggest pain with most PDF viewers, not watching files; at any rate it's what I miss the most now I'm using XeTeX as my main TeX engine. What other viewers do you know watch files?

on OS X:

texniscope http://www2.ing.unipi.it/~d9615/homepage/texniscope.html old, but still good, and pdfview http://pdfview.sourceforge.net/.

Patrick

Peter M pmlists@free.fr writes:

The only reason why I still keep asking for dvi, is the good xdvi viewer.

I agree. xdvi is what prompted me into trying dvi mode again (and investigating dvipos), because of its excellent anti-aliasing. The only pdf viewer whose rendering quality might be comparable is the 'apparition' viewer, part of the fitz http://ccxvii.net/apparition/. Not ready for prime time yet, but it has lots of potential.

If there is something similar for pdf, then yes: you can drop dvi support!

Even then, you would lose source specials. I haven't figured out a way to do it, despite cracking open (via xpdf) the PDF reference manual. I thought about doing with annotations, having pdftex/ConTeXt insert the pdf literals. However, the annotation dictionary doesn't have a cross-platform way of calling a script. It has enough slots to do it for Windows, but nowhere else. At least, that was what I gathered, but maybe a longer look or a shorter look by PDF experts might give a more hopeful conclusion.

-Sanjoy

`Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Sanjoy Mahajan wrote:

Peter M pmlists@free.fr writes:

...

The only reason why I still keep asking for dvi, is the good xdvi viewer.

I agree. xdvi is what prompted me into trying dvi mode again (and investigating dvipos), because of its excellent anti-aliasing. The only pdf viewer whose rendering quality might be comparable is the 'apparition' viewer, part of the fitz http://ccxvii.net/apparition/. Not ready for prime time yet, but it has lots of potential.

there was a time that gs did better rendering than acrobat but that wa slong ago; i think that acrobat's anti aliasing is ok (at least om my high res screen)

also, the latest acrobats (esp v 8) do a pretty good job now on bitmap fonts

Hans

----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

Peter M writes:

I'll try xpdf: I need something fast and that watches the file.

xpdf is fast but it won't watch the file. As far as I know, the only pdf viewer that watches the file, at least on Linux, is gv (ghostscript). If you find another, let me know.

As you say, acroread is slow; plus it's not free software (in the free speech sense), so I have two reasons to not use it.

One (I hope) short project that's high on my to-do list is to add file watching to xpdf. Maybe using inotify or dnotify, at least on linux. The word on the street is that inotify is the better choice, but I don't have experience with either, nor am I sure how widely available they are on linux kernels from distributors.

-Sanjoy

`Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)

As I already wrote: kpdf. Check out evince, if you are using gnome.

Ah, just found your msg. What if you still use twm (now almost 20 years)...Old habits die hard. xpdf has the advantage of minimal screen overhead and is agnostic about the window manager/Desktop.

Actually I'm not sure what a 'desktop' is, other than as the mostly invisible top of a physical desk on which I pile papers, folders, and books.

-Sanjoy

`Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)

on my system, when watching the file, gv issues very often some errors after modification of the pdf-file and that's annoying.

Peter,

You're right. I guessed it might be reading a half-rewritten PDF file before the new xref table is written (at the end of the file) and getting confused.

Alas, more systematic tests of this hypothesis refuted it. I changed the watch interval to 10 seconds (default is 1 second), to reduce the odds that the PDF file was being rewritten while gv was reloading it. Even that change didn't help. gv still produced tons of interpreter errors. I guess it doesn't reread the xref table properly, or something like that. Whatever the cause, it's a pain.

xpdf has a -remote option, so a Makefile rule could make the pdf and then tell xpdf to reload it, via the command line. But I've never managed to get -remote to work with xpdf.

So I'm back to the original plan of hacking xpdf to use inotify via the inotify_init(2) and inotify_add_watch(2) syscalls (dnotify looks like a pain to use). My inotify 'hello world' programs aren't yet working so I have a ways to go.

-Sanjoy

`Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)

xpdf -remote <your_server_name> <file>.pdf

<your_sever_name> is whatever you name it

When needed (e.g. *.tex file has chaned) Makefile generates PDF and calls the server to reload it with

xpdf -reload -remote <your_server_name>

Thanks, that works! I must have had the syntax wrong before. Now I tried

xpdf -remote foo notes.pdf &

And then both these worked:

xpdf -raise -remote foo xpdf -reload -remote foo

In practice (for Makefiles) I'll combine them into

xpdf -reload -raise -remote foo

-Sanjoy

`Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)