Re: HZ and DVI

[Sanjoy Mahajan <sanjoy@mrao.cam.ac.uk>]

> on my system, when watching the file, gv issues very often some
> errors after modification of the pdf-file and that's annoying.

Peter,

You're right.  I guessed it might be reading a half-rewritten PDF file
before the new xref table is written (at the end of the file) and
getting confused.  

Alas, more systematic tests of this hypothesis refuted it.  I changed
the watch interval to 10 seconds (default is 1 second), to reduce the
odds that the PDF file was being rewritten while gv was reloading it.
Even that change didn't help.  gv still produced tons of interpreter
errors.  I guess it doesn't reread the xref table properly, or
something like that.  Whatever the cause, it's a pain.

xpdf has a -remote option, so a Makefile rule could make the pdf and
then tell xpdf to reload it, via the command line.  But I've never
managed to get -remote to work with xpdf.

So I'm back to the original plan of hacking xpdf to use inotify via
the inotify_init(2) and inotify_add_watch(2) syscalls (dnotify looks
like a pain to use).  My inotify 'hello world' programs aren't yet
working so I have a ways to go.

-Sanjoy

`Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)