[pdftex] Synchronicity

[Gerben Wierda]

See the problem/feature description below. Is this on the todo list for 
pdftex?

Gerben

Begin forwarded message:

> From: <gkv at ceto.princeton.edu>
> Date: Wed Jul 16, 2003  00:28:02 Europe/Amsterdam
> To: <MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>
> Cc: <gkv at ceto.princeton.edu>
> Subject: [OS X TeX] Re: Synchronicity on OSX
> Reply-To: "TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List" <MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>
>
>  Forward and inverse search with emacs/xdvi is exactly the same as the
>  'synchronicity' feature thus described. A click (or
>  typically a Ctrl-click) on the dvi file takes you to the source file, 
> and
>  vice versa.
>
>  How this works in most implementations (i.e. using srcltx.sty or
>  using --src-specials when typesetting) is that special
>  characters are frequently inserted into the dvi file that are
>  mapped to position in the source file, so that there is a mapping
>  between source and dvi. There is no need for editor and previewer
>  to be the same application, but the editor must be able to respond
>  properly to the input from the previewer. Emacs will do this, so will
>  Nedit, so will winedt (in the PC world), and I expect that Alpha would
>  do this too. (Someone must know?). At the moment I use emacs
>  and xdvi solely because it has this feature, but I would actually like
>  to use Alpha. It is not trivial to set up this feature
>  on emacs/xdvi, but it does work well once configured.
>
>  However, to my knowledge, this feature is not available with PDFtex.
>  The special characters would have to put into the PDF file (this
>  must be possible) and the PDF viewer would then have to be able to
>  send an appropriate signal to the editor (surely this is possible
>  too?). But as far as I know, no-one has implemented this on the Mac,
>  or any other platform.
>
>  Regards
>  Geoff Vallis
>  gkv at princeton.edu
>
>> Geoffrey,
>>
>> Could you be clear (to a non-emacs user) that "forward and inverse
>> search" is indeed identical to the synchronicity in Textures in which 
>> a
>> click on a character in a dvi file takes one to the point in the 
>> source
>> file that produced that character and vice-versa. In my work now in OS
>> X, I work with pdfs rather than eps and with pdftex. How does the
>> non-existence of a dvi file impact your proposed solution?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> David Oliver
>
G
--
"To be or not to be, that is the question" -- Parmenides