[OS X TeX] xdvi and/or acrobat reader with darwin ports emacs

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 24.01.2005 um 19:36 schrieb Bruno Voisin:

> In the few months that I worked on a Linux box, I've kept being 
> disconcerted by the way xdvi worked: when displaying the same page 
> including an EPS picture, sometimes the picture was shown, sometimes 
> (ie most often) the corresponding page area remained blank.

This is a simple X11 problem: there are at least two graphics objects 
at the same time in the same place. The X Window Manager has to decide 
which one comes on top. This is with two objects complicated, and even 
more with more objects. There was only one real useful solution: NeWS, 
Network extensible Window System, Sun's clone of Display PostScript, 
DPS. It had something like alpha-blending: into an X11 graphics 
contents DPS (tricks) could be painted -- so you could have an X11 
desktop background and were able to write a message on it (usually 
hidden by some other tool's window), display the clock, a calendar, the 
temperature ... It was like with Konfabulator or coming Mac OS X 10.4, 
Tiger. If X11R6.6 hasn't made progress since X11R4 this could still be 
a problem today.

This scheme had disadvantages too: what once was written did not go 
away by a simple refresh, you would have to draw a blank page on the 
screen to erase this.

--
Greetings

   Pete

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