Re: Near real-time preview of PDF/ODT export?

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

> Dear all,
>
> Richard Stallman started a thread on emacs-devel on how to let Emacs
> do WYSIWG word processing:
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg00515.html
>   
>   "25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word
>   processing.  That is why we added text properties and variable width
>   fonts.  However, more features are still needed to achieve this.
>   
>   Could people please start working on the features that are needed?"
>
> This hit the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6773529
>
> I don't want to fork the thread and import the discussion here,
> instead I'd like to discuss a feature for Org that I think would be
> useful*.
>
> How far are we from allowing users to preview an exported Org buffer
> into a separate window, and displaying either a PDF or an ODT document
> through DocView?
>
> Since Org can already perform export asynchronously, maybe all what we
> need is to create a function for `write-file-hooks' that exports in the
> background and display the document in another window.

So with LaTeX it should be pretty easy using latexmk.  Latexmk can
watch for changes in the .tex file and recompile the pdf
intelligently.  For windows there's a program called LaTeXDaemon.

Thus, what would be needed would be to write the tex file when stuff
changes and it wasn't exported in the last t seconds.  Perhaps it
would require some caching, e.g. with heavy babel blocks.

Personally, I'd want to use Evince and not Docview.  Does Docview
notice changes in the pdf?

–Rasmus

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