[texworks] Call for Help: Testing

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi,

On 21.02.21 11:16, Philip Taylor wrote:
> A ?bug? report, Stefan, which you may choose to define as a feature.
>
>     Let run 1 of a given TeX source produce a PDF
>     Let run 2 of the same source, with a change made, produce no PDF
>
> The transcript clearly shews "No pages of output" but the PDF file,
> which did /not/ result from the current run, remains displayed just as
> if it did.  IMHO, the PDF should be closed in the case of "No pages of
> output".  I was genuinely misled by this ?feature?, whence the reason
> for the ?bug? report.

I'm a bit skeptical about this for the following reason:
AFAICT, if TeX says "no pages to output", it does not alter any
(existing) PDF file. As such, whatever PDF you had before is still the
PDF you have saved on your hard disk now. If you were to close and
reopen that file in TeXworks, it would still open the old PDF (as that's
the one on the disk). So closing the PDF file (or even graying it out)
seems somewhat inconsistent to me.
In addition, there are also other situations which in which the pdf does
not accurately reflect the tex file. E.g., if you have an error in your
tex code and abort the tex process. I also wouldn't want to close the
pdf in that case as it can be helpful for determining where something
might be wrong, and to quickly move to the appropriate place in the tex
using SyncTeX.

That being said, it's probably possible to detect "no pages of output"
as a separate (severe) error in the log parser. Please note, though,
that the log parser is a separate script. It may be best to raise this
issue with the author at https://github.com/antoniomacri/texworks-logparser.

Regards,
Stefan
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