[XeTeX] Adobe PDF, Adobe Acrobat/Reader, Microsoft Word, XeTeX, and (x)dvipdfm(x).

[George N. White III]

On Thu, 27 May 2021 at 14:21, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at hellenic-institute.uk>
wrote:

> Over the past couple of days, I have made a substantial number of small
> changes
>
to an MS Word document; on each occasion, as well as saving in MS Word
> format
>
(.docx) I have also saved the document as Adobe PDF (.pdf).  In the course
> of so doing,
>
I have realised that MS Word can instruct Adobe Acrobat (and probably Adobe
> Reader)
>
to close the PDF and then re-open it once the changes have been made.  Is
> there any
>
reason why the (x)dvipdfm(x) back-end to XeTeX cannot [be enhanced to] do
> the same ?
>

Unlike UNIX-based OS's, Windows has problems writing to files that are open
in another
program, so Windows editors and AcroRead support "DynamicDataExchange"
which allows
a program that wants to write a PDF to ask AcroRead to close, and then open
the file after
it has been written.   WinEDT can be configured to close the Adobe PDF
viewer so that TeX
software can write a new PDF.  On Windows, TeX Live provides pdfopen and
pdfclose
programs (I think originally from fptex) that are useful in scripts (to
bracket programs that
create a pdf file):

> type sample2e.cmd
pdfclose sample2e.pdf
lualatex sample2e
pdfopen sample2e.pdf

-- 
George N. White III
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