[texhax] [Skim-app-users] Puzzled user

[Thomas Schneider]

Adam:

> That may reduce the probability of crashing, but there is no
> guarantee that it will actually solve the problems you are seeing.
>
> To anyone thinking of using the automatic reload: you are asking for
> crashes and concomitant data loss. Setting the related hidden
> defaults mentioned on the wiki is stupid.

I respectfully beg to strongly differ.

You are thinking about the limitations of the currently available
tools.

We are thinking about smooth and flexible workflows.

We want a design where we edit LaTeX code in our favorate editor (not
some poor inflexible design imposed upon us by a graphical user
interface).  We then want the automatic conversion to a PDF.  I use
atchange to do this so that I just type a ',' while in vim and the
file gets written out and the conversion happens automagically.  When
I'm at work, I want a PDF displayer to notice that the file was
written and to display the changes without altering the current view
in any other way.

When I'm at home, I ssh to work and my showpdf script realizes that
and sends the PDF to me from work.  I want the PDF displayer at home
to update the PDF.

This works 99.9% of the time without crashes.  The result is that
either at work or at home (or anywhere!!) I have one window I edit in
without using the mouse.  In another window the resulting PDF is
displayed whenever I want.

This is a WIWIWIG "what I want is what I get" system.

I chose to work with Skim because it handles this beautifully most of
the time.  I could not even get a response from Adobe to implement an
automatic update feature.  There is clearly a need for this mode.  For
those using this mode we do NOT CARE ABOUT MARKING OUR PDF.  EVER. 
(We do that separately.  We are responsible if we write marks and they
are overwritten.)

If there were a way to tell Skim to update the PDF from the unix
command line then the rare crashes presumably would be eliminated. 
(These crashes involve the silly spinning ball and so take precious
time so a way to avoid them, though rare, would be nice.)

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  Senior Investigator
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research
  Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  schneidt at mail.nih.gov
  http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms