[geeks] better word-processing previewing....

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, August 31, 2001 at 23:07:17 (+0100), David Cantrell wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Re: [rescue] Re: nuking M$ from orbit

Did I mention yet already that I really Really REALLY *HATE* it when the
mailing list software mangles the subject line?  :-)

> Of course.  But that particular use of the feature does not make the
> feature an object of purest evil.

I'm not so sure.  If it did what it was supposed to do that feature
should not exist.....

.... but anyway, down to the brass tacks:

> I refer, of course, to being able to see both the structure of the
> document (the TeX markup) and the pretty-printed version of the same
> thing.  Very helpful when - for example - embedding a table in a
> document.  I, unlike perhaps yourself, have yet to attain my black
> belt in TeX-wrangling, and I really would like to see that it is
> doing what I expect it to do.
>  
> Yes.  But that doesn't update the display as I update the document, and
> it won't go straight to the right part of the right page when I'm editing
> working the fifth paragraph of sub-section 3 of section 5 of chapter 9
> of my magnum opus.

How incremental do you want the update, and how much CPU do you have?
Hopefully you've arranged to have your PS generated on at most a
per-chapter basis, not for the entire book at once!!!

If your PostScript output conforms to the PS DSC then 'gv -watch' will
most definitely always re-display the same page you were looking at
previously and that means you only have to navigate to the table, graph,
or drawing once, and then watch it flash up with new changes every time
you save the source.

Note that you might need a little time-stamp watcher to re-invoke "make"
every time any source file changes too -- though I generally just use
the emacs "compile" macro to re-run make after I save the source....

While Lout (and sometimes even TeX and Troff) can be bears to run on
older slower CPUs, even a moderately powered machine, eg. with a Intel
PPro 200MHz, can update the PS output for a many-paged document in less
time than it takes to sip your coffee, and 'gv -watch' on that PS file
will re-display the same page you're already looking at within one
second plus an eye blink (so long as there's nothing extremely difficult
to draw on the page, but even then you'll get near-instant feedback).

I don't do this very often myself because I'm very comfortable to trust
the layout details to troff/TeX/lout until I'm doing the final "camera
ready" proofing (at which point I want actual paper between my fingers),
but with something that does require more attention to detail, such as a
PIC figure or such, 'gv -watch' works wonderfully.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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