Re: Suggestion for improvement

[Alexander Kobel]

On 07/15/2014 03:58 PM, Urs Liska wrote:
> Am 15.07.2014 15:56, schrieb Knute Snortum:
> > Any other thoughts?
>
> Nothing constructive, only the observation (for the record) that this is
> a Windows-only issue.

Just for the record, it's not a Windows issue rather than an 
Adobe-Reader-on-Windows issue (see, e.g., [1]).  For some reason I never 
understood, it opens the file in a blocking mode on Windows.  Same issue 
for, e.g., LaTeX.
Closing it might technically be possible, but it's not nice to kill 
other processes.  There are different options to replace content 
(rewrite the file, or delete and move a new one to the same place), and 
they do make a difference, but AFAIK, Adobe does not play nicely with 
both.  And what you really want is that your reader auto-refreshes when 
new content arrives, which requires some support on the viewer side.
In short: it's a well-known annoyance that is beyond the PDF creator's 
domain.

Fortunately, other readers exist which don't lock the file and even take 
notice of file updates automagically.  SumatraPDF [2] is the one 
recommended most often.


HTH,
Alexander

[1] 
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/1329/automatically-updating-pdf-reader-for-windows
[2] http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html