Viewers for PDF, PS, and DVIOpening compiled document at specific point

Information and discussion about output viewers related to LaTeX (e.g. Adobe Reader, Ghostview, YAP, ...)
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vaalsta
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Jul 20, 2010 9:59 am

Opening compiled document at specific point

Post by vaalsta »

Hi all,

I wasn't sure whether to put this in here or in the text editor section but anyway:

Like many I use the 'compile and view' feature of my text editor (TeXnicCenter) to compile and view my document in acrobat professional (straight to pdf). If I'm working on typesetting something difficult I often find myself using this feature very often. The annoying thing is when the little bit of tex code you're working on happens to be on page 20 and you either have to pummel the mouse wheel, or type the page number into the view options bar at the top of acrobat.

Is it at all possible for TeXnicCenter (or any editor) to work out where your cursor is in the document code and somehow pass this information to acrobat (or any other pdf viewer) to open at the pdf at the corresponding section? Even the correct page would be good.

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localghost
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Posts: 9202
Joined: Fri Feb 02, 2007 12:06 pm

Opening compiled document at specific point

Post by localghost »

The Ad0be products are known not to be the best solutions when it comes to cooperating with TeX editors. From my own experience I can highly recommend the Sumatra PDF viewer [1]. Like the Ad0be Reader it understands DDE commands and can easily be set up to cooperate with TeXnicCenter (TXC) [2,3]. Furthermore it masters SyncTeX so that you can do forward and inverse search in the current PDF document. Unlike the Ad0be Reader it doesn't lock the opened file but reloads it as soon as it detects modifications and jumps to the point where you are currently working in the source code. From my point of view the best partner for a LaTeX editor. It seems that the developers of TXC have a similar opinion so they made Sumatra the default PDF viewer for TXC2 even if the Ad0be Reader is present on a system. But TXC1 also works after configured according to the above mentioned tutorials. They describe the configuration better that anybody else could do.

Nevertheless there are some other viewers like Foxit Reader or PDF XChange Viewer. From those I'm not sure if they master SyncTeX for forward and inverse search. But with TeXworks there is an interesting alternative which incorporates an editor with a PDF Viewer. But it is meant only for compilation to direct PDF output (with PDFLaTeX, XeLaTeX, …).

[1] Free PDF Reader — Sumatra PDF
[2] TeXnicCenter — Tutorials
[3] william.famille-blum.org news — Configuring editors with SumatraPDF


Thorsten
vaalsta
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Jul 20, 2010 9:59 am

Re: Opening compiled document at specific point

Post by vaalsta »

I have since installed sumatraPDF and it's working a charm. I followed the tutorials on the links you posted but I can't get texniccenter to go to the point when I double click it in sumatra. I think this is because the full path to my tex document has spaces in it (...my documents/my dropbox/...)

Thanks Thorsten!!
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