Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Default settings

[David Kastrup]

Florêncio Neves <address@hidden> writes:

> On 3/17/14, Tassilo Horn <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Florêncio Neves <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>> Hi Florêncio,
>>
>>> I think the following settings should become the default:
>>>
>>>   (add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)
>>>   (setq reftex-plug-into-AUCTeX t)
>>
>> As Uwe mentioned, reftex is a separate package on XEmacs, so it might
>> not be installed.  We could possibly check if it's available and if so,
>> enable it.  Though, in general, I think it's better to start out basic
>> and make it easy to enable things instead of starting out big and making
>> it hard for users that don't want a particular feature to disable it
>> again.
>
> Well, you can always *disable* stuff that you don't like.  I find it
> much more likely that people give up using AUCTeX because it appears
> not to do even the most basic stuff.
>
> I consider direct PDF generation the "basic" option, and going through
> DVI the "technical" alternative that might be required in some
> esoteric situation.

preview-latex is so much faster using dvipng for rendering rather than
going via PDF that it's not funny (several orders of magnitude), and DVI
is all you need for working on math papers, arguably the largest
clientele.  When one is talking about several thousand formulas in a
paper (and I am not halluscinating here: my father is a theoretical
physicist and is still publishing and using Emacs/preview-latex for his
workflow), this makes quite a difference even on modern machines.

PDFLaTeX itself is also significantly slower than straight LaTeX on
large documents due to font handling issues.  This does not change when
using the same pdftex executable for generating both DVI and PDF output.

In a similar vein, DVI viewers are much faster to work with than PDF
viewers.  They also tend to render more readably.

-- 
David Kastrup