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Re: is xdvi broken?



On 2019.04.20 19:42, David Wright wrote:
Then it might be worth revisiting your deliverables and seeing whether
a DVI workflow is still worth using after two decades.
...
It's too long to remember exactly how I produced output for both
static HTML pages and hardcopy. I still have macros for the hyperlatex
package (CTAN, not .deb), but I also used tex4ht ...

I once used hyperlatex to maintain a web site with documents in both HTML and PDF. Execution of a single makefile regenerated the entire website from the LaTeX source documents; that took about ten minutes. But then HTML5 came along, and hyperlatex was not renovated to generate HTML5.

Since that time I have used tex4ht and at least one other Debian package for direct conversion of a LaTeX document to HTML. But I recently discovered an advanced debian package "latex2html" which came out about a year ago and is designed to build an entire web site directly from LaTeX document files.

So you expect that visitors can print from PDFs but you print locally
with PS. Any reason?

Mine is a one-horse outfit. I cannot afford to publish by printing and mailing material. But I can afford to publish by posting documents in HTML and PDF on a web site. HTML accommodates the visually-impaired. On occasion, however, there is need print and mail out a document to someone. And I like to keep a paper copy for myself; I do not enjoy reading a long document displayed on a computer screen. Whenever I read, I keep close at hand a red pen and a yellow high-lighter.

I constantly switch between the emacs screen and the xdvi screen as
I compose.
How do you "switch" between them?

Alt-TAB, multiple times if necessary. I switch back and forth between four or five windows: Emacs, dictionary, xdvi, terminal, and sometimes a reference document on a web page. Running latexmk, I hardly ever needed to switch to the terminal window.

To print a copy for proofreading, I execute dvips, then lpr.


Of course, a PDF preview will give a preview as close to WYSIWYG as
a DVI one, if that's what you like. (I prefer typing content into
a context that doesn't keep shifting around, and leave the layout
to a later phase when I'm not preoccupied with content.)

Understood; I agree. I should not have said WYSIWYG. I am very comfortable with the LaTeX markup on the Emacs screen, so I do not look at the xdvi screen all that often. But viewing the typeset document does display the table of contents; also, it facilitates decisions on structure (such as bulleted list vs. enumerated list, and list vs. subsections), and it helps me produce a document which is attractive and reader-friendly.



That's why I asked how you "switch" between them, above, in order to
find out what shortcut you're using that makes hitting "R" in the
preview window too onerous. I find a major advantage in not having
the viewer update itself automatically.

I agree; so just before switching to the viewer, I save the document (Ctr-x s) in Emacs and then switch; but if I wish to look again at the old version, I switch without saving.


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