[OS X TeX] ideal PDF viewer requestion (background auto-update)

David Wooten wooten at berkeley.edu
Fri May 28 17:51:01 EDT 2004


Greetings friends,
this may well be an often brought-up question (as I have come across 
the mailing list in my vain attempts to search for the answer) so 
please be patient with me. Here's my situation:

I'm using:

teTeX via fink
vim via fink in Apple's X11 -- in xterm

as a viewer:

iTeXMac.

Now iTexMac works almost perfectly as a viewer for me --- almost.
Particularly nice is the fact that it allows two-column view for 
side-by-side page layouts.

The one feature which I am really going crazy about is the auto-update 
feature so familiar to us from gv. I've spent some hours (I'd rather 
not say how many) trying to figure out a way to get a nice auto-update 
setup in OS X. For example, I've recently been excited by the perl 
script latexmk, which will watch for changes in e.g. the aux files and 
automatically run pdflatex (in my case) as many times as needed in 
order to complete the BibTeX citations and so forth.

iTeXMac does  have the ability to auto-update the pdf file, but 
apparently only does so when it is the front application -- this I have 
to switch from X11 to iTM and back again. This is petty I know -- but 
very frustrating!  Afaict, none of the other OS X previewers even do 
this much. I need background auto-update! -- and I can't be the only 
one.

Why not use gv in X11 you ask? Well, for one it doesn't really handle 
background pdf auto-update, for another it doesn't have the nice pdf 
rendering we enjoy in Preview, iTexMac, TeXShop and so on.

Is it too much to hope for a pdf viewer which does 2 column (page 
side-by-side) background auto-update?

Any advice or even commiseration is greatly appreciated ;)

David Wooten-----------------------------------------------------
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