Re: doc-view.el --- View PDF/PostScript/DVI files in Emacs

[Tassilo Horn]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

Hi David,

>> I don't agree here.  IMO it wastes too much screen estate to display
>> the margins.  When those were cut off I could split my emacs frame
>> horizontally and view a PDF doc in one window and have another
>> 80-columns window for work.
>>
>> Now that's not possible anymore because the images contain those huge
>> margins.  The only solution is to make the images smaller but that
>> makes them hard to read.  And I cannot scroll-left to center the
>> image.  Even `C-u 1 C-x <' scrolls too much.
>
> That is an argument for giving better scrolling/margining behavior to
> Emacs (you _do_ realize that Emacs can display partial images?).

Not yet, but I'll have a look at how that can be done.  Thanks for the
pointer.

> So you can add an option for selecting a page area you want to see,
> possibly by dragging a rectangle across the image, and then get a
> _consistent_ display of margins across your whole document.

That would be really nice.

>> Currently I don't really see how preview.el could be useful for
>> doc-view.  Ok, maybe I could display the first pages before the
>> conversion of the rest has finished, but with ghostview conversion is
>> so fast that I don't see any benefit that would justify to make the
>> code more complex.
>>
>> For example doc-view on my practicalcommonlisp.pdf which has 528
>> pages takes about one minute.  And even this has to be done only one
>> time...
>
> preview-latex renders the page you are looking at in a fraction of a
> second, even when we are talking about documents with a thousand
> pages.  Out of order rendering vastly increases the interactive
> response.
>
>> So please give some concrete examples how I could enhance doc-view.el
>> with preview.el.
>
> Shrug.  If you don't consider sub-second response times as opposed to
> minute delays an enhancement, I am out of my depth guessing what would
> qualify as one.

The problem is that preview.el is quite complex and till now I don't
have an idea how to use it for my purpose.  And I'm lacking the right
amount of time to study it carefully.

Nevertheless, now doc-view.el can display pages as soon as they're
available, so users can start viewing nearly immediately even if the
file is not in the cache.

Bye,
Tassilo
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