Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: [AUCTeX-diffs] Changes to auctex/doc/todo.texi

[David Kastrup]

Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> writes:

> * David Kastrup (2005-04-28) writes:
>
>> Call me crazy.
>
> More like utterly insane. (c;
>
> Regarding the release: I am currently working on the selection of
> viewers which is progressing rather slowly.  At the current state it
> seems like this will introduce some incompatible changes, so it might
> not be feasible for the upcoming release anyway.
>
> If you want to get rid of tex-mik.el and tex-fptex.el, we could
> probably use some ugly hacks to switch viewers in
> `TeX-output-view-style' and the other related stuff with help of a
> customizable variable (`TeX-tex-system' or something like that).

I have unchecked code using custom themes.  Of our code bases, only
Emacs-21 does not have them, and the workarounds are minimal.
XEmacs-21.4, surprisingly, has synched them already.

I am not changing anything in this release: no sense in doing that
right now.  But it is on the agenda before 12.0.

> But as this is not where I am heading to, I would not wanna
> introduce it for just one release.

No panic.  I think the current change set is large enough (actually,
somewhat too large since I also could not resist lifting the
restriction that directory variables have to end with a directory
separator).

> What I am after is a very user-friendly interface where there is a
> (mostly internal) list of viewers and the user can pick one of those
> by some "human-readable" name; i.e. you can say: "As DVI viewer I
> wanna have xdvi, the HTML viewer should be Mozilla Firefox ...".
> All this is then mapped internally to appropriate conditions for the
> document and output files as well as the options to pass to the
> viewer.  The (initial) value of the variable which holds the mapping
> of viewer type to viewer program can then be set by a Custom theme.
> This might of course be similar to the hypothetical `TeX-tex-system'
> variable mentioned above.  But all this will not happen soon and the
> approach might as well turn out as a dead end.

Yes.  We will have to do something about this.  Another nuisance: I
_knew_ it was a mistake to throw out the TeX-master question.  In
debugging a multifile document, I got one problem after the other: I
fixed most of the breakage.  Files loaded by C-c ` now get the default
master of the session (otherwise, the log file will not be found, errr
searching can't be resumed and so on).

Now the only thing missing in master inheritance, I think, are source
specials: if I use inverse search to jump into a new document, this
document should get its master setting from the job associated with
the viewer.  I am somewhat at a loss how to do that.

But anyway, for 11.80 it will be a big enough job to fix everything
that I broke or built new.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum