mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Andrea Gamba<address@hidden>]

Hi Alfe,

>> It would be much better if the production of the pdf or of the new document
>> were treated as background jobs, so that the user could continue to 
>> interact
>> with the program during their completion.

>To solve this problem, TeXmacs would have to create the PDF from an 
>internally created copy of the current document (whose creation might be a 
>similar long-running task as the PDF creation).

I think it should work exactly as you say. Just copying the document is not a
long-running task because it involves no computation at all. More precisely,
what you would do would be to pipe the document to a separate job that would 
do
the processing.

I think the convenience of not having to stop working until the end of the
process is huge. It breaks the continuity of your work. For instance, I may be
willing to see the results of work done on one section and meanwhile start
looking at the following section, but I cannot do it because the pdf takes 
some
minute to be composed (and it's not in the background as it could be). 
Consider
that the time of composing a pdf may be long for several reasons (such as the
presence of images in the document, for instance).

Andrea