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

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:

> michael@cadilhac.name (Michaël Cadilhac) writes:
>
> Hi Michaël,
>
>> This a good feature, but when I tried it on a 60-page document, my
>> processor load quickly reached 10 and I was completely stuck. C-g
>> did nothing, my firefox was killed, and one of the light bulb of my
>> room exploded (there may be no connection for the last one, I'm
>> just not sure).
>
> Yes, that's normal.  Be happy that it caches the page files so that
> it will open immediately when you want to view this document again.
>
> You can limit the resources convert uses with some environment
> variables or it's -limit option.  See the WARNING in the commentary.
> And now it displays a message while it's converting, too.

Have you tried out preview-latex (integrated with AUCTeX since version
11.80)?  It displays images in Emacs buffers without blocking Emacs at
all, and renders stuff in the background with a focus on material that
is on-screen.  It works using Ghostscript on either PDF or PostScript
files (in the latter case, dvips is used) or dvipng on DVI files.
Ghostscript is used as a daemon in order to render the stuff in a
useful order, and a single Ghostscript session renders all images.

So it would seem like quite a good candidate for borrowing code.  In
particular since the entirety of preview-latex is already
copyright-assigned to the FSF (as opposed to other parts of AUCTeX
where this process is still under work).

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum