Re: doc-view.el --- View PDF/PostStript/DVI files in Emacs

[Bill Clementson]

Hi Tassilo,

Tassilo Horn <address@hidden> writes:

> Bill Clementson <address@hidden> writes:
>> There are a few ways that it could probably be made better though:
>>
>> 1. It is slow: It would probably be better to provide an async mode
>> option. In other words, instead of waiting for the convert process to
>> complete, let the user view the pages that have been generated and
>> periodically, have doc-view automatically update the
>> doc-view-current-files variable with the updated list of pages.
>
> I don't think that would help much.  The generation of the pictures is
> about the last 5-10% of the transformation.

Darn. That's the major hassle with using doc-view and I thought having
async functionality would make it less painful.

>> 2. Cancel key: There should be a key binding to cancel the convert
>> process and (optionally) view what has been generated so far.
>
> I've done that yesterday.  Get the current version.

Just did a git pull and it said I had the most up-to-date version
already. I didn't see anything in the source - maybe you haven't
checked it into your git repository yet?

>> 3. Page count: It would be useful to have a running update of how many
>> pages have been converted so far in the minibuffer (or maybe the mode
>> line so that the minibuffer isn't being continually updated and can be
>> used for other commands).
>
> See my answer to point 1.

ok.

>> 4. Batch mode: It would be nice to have an option to kick off a batch
>> background process to do the conversion. For big documents, it isn't
>> really practical to wait till it's been converted.
>
> Well, why do you think you have to wait?  Go on with your work and
> eventually the *DocView* buffer pops up.  (That's much better in the
> current version now.)

The convert process seems very resource hungry as my Powerbook G4
slows to a crawl (and is basically unusable) when I'm converting a
large (2MB) PDF file. On small PDF's, it's still usable (but slow). I
thought that a batch option would provide an alternative that might
not be as intrusive.

>> 5. Dired key: It would be nice to have a defcustom value that would
>> specify a dired map key that would call doc-view on a file (with a new
>> doc-view function that doesn't prompt for the file name). This would
>> make it easier to "browse" pdf files in dired.
>
> Good idea.  I'll add that.  Do you have a good suggestion what key could
> be used and is free?

How about "b" (for browse) or "V" (for View)?

>> Did I mention that doc-view is way cool? :-)
>
> And think of how cool it will be in 5 or ten years when we all have
> 64-core 50 GHz computers with 512 GB RAM!!!

At the moment, I would be happy to just replace my Powerbook with a
dual core computer with 4GB of RAM!

- Bill