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Viewers are normally invoked by pressing C-c C-c once the document
is formatted, which will propose the View command, or by activating the
respective entry in the Command menu. Alternatively you can type
C-c C-v which calls the function TeX-view
.
(C-c C-v) Start a viewer without confirmation. The viewer is
started either on a region or the master file, depending on the last
command issued. This is especially useful for jumping to the location
corresponding to point in the viewer when using
TeX-source-correlate-mode
.
AUCTeX will try to guess which type of viewer (DVI, PostScript or PDF) has to be used and what options are to be passed over to it. This decision is based on the output files present in the working directory as well as the class and style options used in the document. For example, if there is a DVI file in your working directory, a DVI viewer will be invoked. In case of a PDF file it will be a PDF viewer. If you specified a special paper format like ‘a5paper’ or use the ‘landscape’ option, this will be passed to the viewer by the appropriate options. Especially some DVI viewers depend on this kind of information in order to display your document correctly. In case you are using ‘pstricks’ or ‘psfrag’ in your document, a DVI viewer cannot display the contents correctly and a PostScript viewer will be invoked instead.
The association between the tests for the conditions mentioned above and
the viewers is made in the variable TeX-view-program-selection
.
Therefore this variable is the starting point for customization if you
want to use other viewers than the ones suggested by default.
This is a list of predicates and viewers which is evaluated from front
to back in order to find out which viewer to call under the given
conditions. In the first element of each list item you can reference
one or more predicates defined in TeX-view-predicate-list
or
TeX-view-predicate-list-builtin
. In the second element you can
reference a viewer defined in TeX-view-program-list
or
TeX-view-program-list-builtin
. The viewer of the first item with
a positively evaluated predicate is selected.
So TeX-view-program-selection
only contains references to the
actual implementations of predicates and viewer commands respectively
which can be found elsewhere. AUCTeX comes with a set of
preconfigured predicates and viewer commands which are stored in the
variables TeX-view-predicate-list-builtin
and
TeX-view-program-list-builtin
respectively. If you are not
satisfied with those and want to overwrite one of them or add your own
definitions, you can do so via the variables
TeX-view-predicate-list
and TeX-view-program-list
.
This is a list of predicates for viewer selection and invocation. The first element of each list item is a symbol and the second element a Lisp form to be evaluated. The form should return nil if the predicate is not fulfilled.
A built-in predicate from TeX-view-predicate-list-builtin
can be
overwritten by defining a new predicate with the same symbol.
This is a list of viewer specifications each consisting of a symbolic
name and either a command line or a function to be invoked when the
viewer is called. If a command line is used, parts of it can be
conditionalized by prefixing them with predicates from
TeX-view-predicate-list
or
TeX-view-predicate-list-builtin
. (See the doc string for the
exact format to use.) The command line can also contain placeholders as
defined in TeX-expand-list
and TeX-expand-list-builtin
which are expanded before the viewer is called.
The third element of each item is a string, or a list of strings, with
the name of the executable, or executables, needed to open the output
file in the viewer. Placeholders defined in TeX-expand-list
and
TeX-expand-list-builtin
can be used here. This element is
optional and is used to check whether the viewer is actually available
on the system.
A built-in viewer spec from TeX-view-program-list-builtin
can be
overwritten by defining a new viewer spec with the same name.
After the viewer is called via either the View command or the key stroke
C-c C-v, the window system focus goes and stays on the viewer. If
you prefer that the focus is pulled back to Emacs immediately after that
and you are using evince-compatible viewer, customize the option
TeX-view-enince-keep-focus
.
When this option is non-nil and the viewer is compatible with evince, the focus is pulled back to Emacs immediately after the viewer is invoked or refreshed from within AUCTeX.
Note that the viewer selection and invocation as described above will
only work if certain default settings in AUCTeX are intact. For one,
the whole viewer selection machinery will only be triggered if there is
no ‘%V’ expander in TeX-expand-list
. So if you have trouble
with the viewer invocation you might check if there is an older
customization of the variable in place. In addition, the use of a
function in TeX-view-program-list
only works if the View command
in TeX-command-list
makes use of the hook
TeX-run-discard-or-function
.
Note also that the implementation described above replaces an older one
which was less flexible. This old implementation works with the
variables TeX-output-view-style
and TeX-view-style
which
are used to associate file types and style options with viewers. If
desired you can reactivate it by using the placeholder ‘%vv’ for
the View command in TeX-command-list
. Note however, that it is
bound to be removed from AUCTeX once the new implementation proved to
be satisfactory. For the time being, find a short description of the
mentioned customization options below.
List of output file extensions, style options and view options. Each
item of the list consists of three elements. If the first element (a
regular expression) matches the output file extension, and the second
element (a regular expression) matches the name of one of the style
options, any occurrence of the string %V
in a command in
TeX-command-list
will be replaced with the third element.
List of style options and view options. This is the predecessor of
TeX-output-view-style
which does not provide the possibility to
specify output file extensions. It is used as a fallback in case none
of the alternatives specified in TeX-output-view-style
match. In
case none of the entries in TeX-view-style
match either, no
suggestion for a viewer is made.
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