David Hewitt wrote:
As usual, Paul points the way to the promised land.
I think you're confusing me with my (much) older brother Moses. ;-)
(2) I have always used Adobe Reader in many past versions and never had this issue.
You probably were using pdfview in earlier versions; I know I was. I'm not positive (about anything, in fact), but I think Uwe's installer might have made pdfview the default.
AND, even with the format viewer changed to 'pdfview', Adobe Reader is the viewer that is started, but DOES allow me to update. Huh?? Basically everything just operates the way it used to, so I presume that with the upgrade something changed the viewer from 'pdfview' to 'auto' for me,
Seems likely.
which then broke my ability to update the PDF displayed in Adobe Reader. Overall, I am confused as to what 'pdfview' does,
It runs pdfclose.exe (also in your LyX\bin directory) to close the existing Acroread window, then runs pdfopen.exe (yep, bin directory again) to open the modified file in Acroread.
If you contrast this with Update -> DVI, the difference is that Yap (the DVI viewer) doesn't lock the DVI file. So LaTeX can overwrite the DVI file even while Yap is open, and then either LaTeX gooses Yap or Yap figures out on its own that the file has changed (not sure which) and updates its display. I think this also works with some "off brand" PDF viewers. Acroread, however, puts a lock on the PDF file while it's open, so when pdflatex goes to output the revised version, the OS won't let it overwrite the file, and pdflatex crabs about it and bails out. Hence the need for pdfview to close the initial window (and thus break the file lock) in a timely manner.
particularly because when I double-click the pdfview.exe file from explorer I get an error that no PDF viewer is installed, with a subsequent abort.
As Joost pointed out, pdfview requires a file as an argument (which LyX supplies).
