Re: Interacting between dvi and latex in emacs.

[d_pleydell@yahoo.com]

Thanks for all the feed back. To summarise a little for others

xdvi handles forward and inverse searching
curtosy of autex. This is enabled with C-c C-t C-s. To do the forward
search you have to compile and display the latex file every time you
want that feature i.e. either C-c C-c two or three times plus enter
twice to get the new display (quite labourious if repeated often), or
with the gui buttons for latex and dvi which for once is easier. The
inverse search is simpler, ctrl-mouse in the dvi and emacs will jump
to the relevant buffer at the relevant point.

A faster alternative for forward seasrch is whizzytex used with
advi. The forward search is automatic, although can take a second or
two to calculate. For inverse search use shft-mouse. A whizzy menu is
added to emacs when you do M-x whizzytex-mode and you have options on
slicing, that is you can restrict automatic updating to a single
section (default) or chapter if you like. This probably saves
computation time and also always puts the start of the section at the
top of the page in advi when xdvi might be displaying the paragraph
you are working on on two different pages, so a nice feature. Where
xdvi is still nicer though is to have the clickable page numbers and
scrolling with the arrow and page buttons. In advi you can only go
through the pages successively with n (next) or p (previous) which is
a little idiosyncratic. Appart from this gripe advi seems the smarter
way to go due to it's auto forward search which also includes a yellow
character cursor in the dvi display - the xdvi equivelent to which is
a less precise bounding box on the current paragraph. If you really
want page jumping you can use both xdvi and advi at the same time but
confussion between ctrl-mouse (xdvi) with shft-mouse (advi) seems
likely.

kdvi also has possibilities with quite a functional viewer and what
appears to be quite detailed help files, but I hit configuration
issues which I didn't spend any time fighting. Also whizzytex is said
to work with xdvi too, but I couldn't get that working quickly.

hope all that is useful for someone.