Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Auctex, synctex and Evince

[Ralf Angeli]

* José ALISTE (2010-06-10) writes:

> I recently added support for synctex in Evince (which is in process of 
> review by evince maintainer), and so I wonder how to integrate this work 
> with Auctex. Evince will have it's own synctex parser and will add a 
> DBUS method for forward search and a DBUS signal for backward search. 
> Since I don't have experiences with auctex, I would like to know if 
> anyone is interested in implementing support in auctex to use this DBUS 
> interface  (I believe that you support a patched version of evince), or 
> provide some guidance in how to do this integration, or to provide 
> coments about the DBUS API we are using.

Currently AUCTeX makes use of the -p command line option of Evince in
order to advise it to open a document on a specific page.  The inverse
(or backward) search is traditionally supported by letting the viewer
call `emacsclient' with the respective options.  So both forward and
inverse search is accomplished by using command line tools.

Personally I haven't worked with DBUS in Emacs yet.  But at the time
when I was thinking about support for DDE on Windows, the main challenge
I saw was that AUCTeX only has a View command and no separate commands
for updating the viewer or jumping to a particular position.  If one
wants to stick to a single command for interacting with the viewer, the
command would have to have some logic about when to start the viewer and
when only to advise it to show a different page because it is already
running.

In AUCTeX one can carry out a function instead of simply executing a
command line when calling a viewer.  If the function can incorporate the
logic hinted at above, then supporting DBUS should be no major problem.
However, at least the forward search works fine via the command line at
the moment.  What would be gained to implement it with DBUS?

-- 
Ralf