[AUCTeX-devel] Re: Setup mess...

[Ralf Angeli]

* David Kastrup (2005-04-13) writes:

> Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> writes:
>
>   Especially on X11 you have a plethora of
>> choices, kdvi, tkdvi, xdvi, acroread, gpdf, xpdf, whatsitsname.  On
>> Windows in contrast mainly `start' is used to get the system default
>> for different file types (BTW, we might consider using mailcap or MIME
>> where it's available).
>
> We should not merely consider it.  It is definitely something we
> should do.  Unfortunately, we can't just use "run-mailcap" or similar
> when available since we also have to cater for things like source
> specials and stuff.  So we will need to take a look at mailcap
> directly.

We could just strip everything but the executable from the return
value of e.g. (mailcap-mime-info "application/dvi").

>> So for viewers it would probably make more sense to have an alist of
>> them as well as their command line options and a variable to select
>> one which is available on the system.
>
> No objection here.  Still the default for that variable could usefully
> depend on the general scheme.

Well, the fun stuff of this approach is coming up with a sensible
scheme for storing information on options and values for different
paper sizes, landscape etc. and selecting them.  A few months ago when
I already thought about this, I wrote down this for xdvi:

          (("^a4paper\\|a4\\|a4dutch\\|a4wide\\|sem-a4$" "-paper a4")
           (("^a5paper\\|a5\\|a5comb$" "^landscape$") "-paper a5r")
           ("^a5paper\\|a5\\|a5comb$" "-paper a5")
           ("^b5paper$" "-paper b5")
           ("^letterpaper$" "-paper us")
           ("^legalpaper$" "-paper legal")
           ("^executivepaper$" "-paper 7.25x10.5in")
           ("^landscape$" "-paper a4r")))

A more general approach would be nicer.

> Your proposal needs fleshing out (to make use of source specials and
> stuff), and mailcap won't tell us about conversion chains.

I think it is feasible to start by only changing viewer selection
(program and options) and leaving the other toolchain stuff alone for
the time being.  But of course the viewer selection proposal has to
be described in more detail nevertheless.

> But at least mailcap.el exists in all relevant Emacs versions, and we
> even use it in preview-latex at one point IIRC.

I should have guessed that there already is something available in
Emacs.

> So configuring the default viewer command to be TeX-view-mailcap
> should be easy enough, and that will then leaf through the offered
> viewers and pick the one it is most comfortable with.  And if the Mime
> commands lead to nothing useful, a default guess like we have
> currently is used again.

Yep.

-- 
Ralf