Re: Auctex&Beamer recognising pdftex mode automatically

[Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE>]

Am 11.05.2007 um 00:14 schrieb Brendan Halpin:

> I've been looking for a way to get Emacs/AucTeX to recognise that a
> paticular latex file should be processed by pdflatex, and was
> delighted to stumble on the fact that \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
> or \documentclass[pdftex]{...} was enough.
>
> But it doesn't seem to work for Beamer files, i.e.
> \documentclass[pdftex]{beamer} still gets put in LaTeX-mode. Is
> this an oddity of beamer.cls?

In a modern TeX installation latex is a sym-link, for example to  
pdftex, which itself is actually pdfetex. So latex produces PDF  
directly.

You can make AUCTeX prefer pdfTeX by adding this customisation(s,  
enabling micro-typography for DVI output, too):

	 '(TeX-PDF-mode t)
	; '(TeX-DVI-via-PDFTeX t)

The third option is to add a file local variable:

	%%% TeX-command-default: "pdfelatex"

which needs to de defined as a TeX command in AUCTeX.


IMO it is not recommended to restrict TeX packages to some mode  
(pdftex, dvips, ...), except you use a package of which you exactly  
know that it is not able to determine whether (x)dvipdfm(x) or dvips  
or something else will process the DVI output. Not using such a  
restrictive options the LaTeX source is free to be compiled by any  
TeX version to PDF, DVI, or whatever. It can be useful to have a  
construct like this in the file's preamble:

	\usepackage{ifpdf}
	\ifpdf
	   \immediate\write16{\jobname: Bonjour, PDF !}
	   \usepackage{cmap}
	   \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
	%   \DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.png,.gif,.tif,.jpeg}
	   \usepackage[activate={true,nocompatibility}]{microtype}
	\else		% for non-pdfTeX
	   \immediate\write16{¡Hola \jobname: DVI!}
	%   \DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.eps,.ps}
	   \usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}
	   \usepackage[protrusion=true,expansion=false]{microtype}
	\fi


--
Greetings

   Pete

The human brain operates at only 10% of its capacity. The rest is  
overhead for the operating system.