Re: Overriding pdfview

[Bill Meahan <subscribed_lists@meahan.net>]

On 6/26/2013 3:29 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:

............[snip]...................
>
> - on none of my window boxes acrobat was preinstalled
> - there is no robust way to start acrobat
> - pdfopen has to be adapted to major updates of acrobat
> - there is (at least on my machine) a potential clash between reader 
> and professional
> - acrobat occasionally tends to block
> - the latest version of acrobat has funny popups when opening docs
>
> while sumatrapdf
>
> - is pretty fast
> - has matured quite well
> - remembers the current page
> - renders quite ok
> - even supports some basic interactivity
> - (has an ugly yellow pop up windows but those can nowadays be recolored)
> - can be installed as portable application
> - works ok wine/linux (in fact has my preference now when on linux)
>

sumatrapdf may be the best PDF viewer ever invented. As a lawyer might 
say, "I'll stipulate that." If someone who wants to use ConTeXt has 
never heard of it and has to use a search engine to even know what it 
is, however, it's not a great default to have on a *public* distribution.

Similar arguments could be made for Calibre (which I use).

> so, enough reasons for me to have changed the defaults (esp because 
> one can always set different defaults)
>

That was my original question: how do I change the default without 
hand-editing a file in the base distribution? That's not only bad 
practice, it's liable to get overwritten on the "next" update.

Does one use texmf.cnf or something else with a very recent MKIV?

>>     Although I first discovered this when trying to use SciTE, it does
>>     the same thing if invoked from the command line. The pdf viewer does
>>     not appear in any of the SciTE *.properties files.

I haven't settled on SciTE as the editor I want to use but a SciTE-only 
workaround misses the point.

>>
>>
>> maybe
>> context --autopdf=acrobat <yourfile.tex>
>> context --autopdf=fullacrobat <yourfile.tex>
>

When run from the cmd.exe command line, acrobat _does_ get launched 
_but_ it gets launched before ConTeXt has created the pdf file then 
hangs so the only way to exit is a Ctrl-C in the cmd.exe window. Simply 
closing acrobat simply causes acrobat to launch again.

A better solution would be to assume the person installing ConTeXt does 
not have a PDF reader *at all* and include some minimal self-contained 
reader (no dll's needed) in the distribution itself, the way rsync is 
included. I really don't care which one, as long as there is *something* 
present. MuPDF might be a good choice but I'm quite sure everyone on the 
list has a favorite they would like to see as the "included" viewer for 
one reason or another. As long as ConTeXt is guaranteed to find it, it 
is a good default.


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