Feature request: LaTeX support

[halabund]

Has Tracker software considered adding TeX/LaTeX support to PDF-XChange Viewer? Currently the only PDF viewer that is really usable with LaTeX is Sumatra PDF, which isn't even comparable to XChange Viewer in terms of reliability and usability. In spite of Sumatra's lack of features and bugs, its number of daily users is exploding since proper LaTeX support was added this summer. Even though I only view TeX-generated documents with it, I find myself using Sumatra more often than XChange Viewer these days, simply because I always have Sumatra open while LaTeXing.

Lots and lots of new users would be attracted to Tracker's PDF viewer if a few small features were added to it to make working with LaTeX easier.

So what are these magical features that make Sumatra so great for TeX users?

• It does not lock the PDF file, so the tex compiler can overwrite it while it is open in the viewer.
• The viewer automatically detects when the document has changed, and it reloads it without any user intervention.
• It has SyncTeX support: a doubleclick in the document takes the input cursor to the corresponding position in the TeX editor. (Actually just launches a user-selectable text editor with command line flags that tell it where to move the cursor.) This is implemented using the official SyncTeX parser.

Will we ever see these features in PDF XChange Viewer? These features might provide an advantage for Tracker over Adobe. There is a huge number of TeX users on Windows. Although their numbers are certainly not comparable with Adobe Reader's user base (so Adobe won't add these features), they could make a significant difference for Tracker Software.

[Tom - Tracker]

halabund

Thanks for your post - I will discuss with the boss man and the development team.

Anyone else support or had experience of what halabund has said?

[BigMike]

I support halabund's suggestion!

In first place, I'd like to point out, that there come up similar requests from time to time:
here also by halabund, here by rc-flitzer and here by myself. They are all about not locking the pdf file while it's opened, so that the pdf can be recreated while viewing it. They are all from LaTeX users - but in fact this applies for any software, which is able to create pdfs.
This is about adding the /close switch to PDF-XChange Viewer. It was requested for the same reason - to unlock the pdf before recreating.
This is the common (but very ugly) way it's done now: Some (La)TeX editors let you specify a build script, where you have to ensure, that the pdfs are closed before recreating and you can open them afterwards again. For Adobe, there are third party applications to shut down the reader. With other editors, you have to close and reopen the pdf manually.

Automatically refreshing the pdfs, when they were changed and jumping to the same position (page) after refreshing would be nice additional features.

I didn't hear something about SyncTeX until now - but since the release history starts in July 2008, this means nothing It sounds very promising, I didn't even know, that this is possible with pdfs.

I also tried Sumatra some time ago, because it doesn't lock the files - but as halamund stated it can't compete with PDF-XChange Viewer. It's a great tool for the LaTeX community (the only one I know with this feature), but since I'm not only producing pdfs and your product is a great viewer, I'll stay

Since LaTeX is a quasi standard to produce scientific texts and there is no comfortable solution for Windows, I'd also think, it would be a great improvement for the PDF-XChange Viewer.

[ahsegeist]

Anyone else support or had experience of what halabund has said?

I second that suggest, too.

Kind regards
Albert

[quant]

I support halabund's suggestion!
Since LaTeX is a quasi standard to produce scientific texts and there is no comfortable solution for Windows ...

WinEdt works great with PDF-XChange Viewer

[craigim]

I signed up for this forum today specifically to find out how to better integrate my LaTeX editor (I currently use TeXnicCenter) with PDF-XChange Viewer.

Since it seems that this is not yet possible, add me to the list of people who whole heartedly endorse these changes/additions.

[halabund]

I support halabund's suggestion!
Since LaTeX is a quasi standard to produce scientific texts and there is no comfortable solution for Windows ...

WinEdt works great with PDF-XChange Viewer

I wouldn't call that way of working "great". It is just as clunky as using Adobe Reader: instruct the reader to close the document first, do a full compile (taking several seconds), then instruct the viewer to open the document again. There's no easy way to precompile the preamble with a tool such as Latex Daemon (precompiling the preamble can make the compilation of small documents nearly instantaneous), there is no seamless auto-reloading of the document, there is no iverse search.

[Ivan - Tracker Software]

Can anybody send me file PDF generated by (La)TeX ?

[quant]

Can anybody send me file PDF generated by (La)TeX ?

please, see attached

[halabund]

Can anybody send me file PDF generated by (La)TeX ?

A large proportion of PDFs found on the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network were generated by TeX. You could try this Google search: site:ctan.org filetype:pdf, and check the document properties for PDFs. If the PDF producer is "pdftex" then the document was generated directly by TeX.

Or, if you want to avoid installing LaTeX, you can compile documents online here. The site uses pdftex 1.40.7 at the moment.

I am not sure what you are looking for in these PDFs, but I heard there there are differences between PDFs generated by different pdftex versions. Version 1.40 is the latest pdftex series. It generates version 1.4 PDFs.