On Feb 23, 2012, at 19:26, Thomas Schneider wrote: > Folks: > > I usually use Skim in the mode where it automatically updates when a > PDF file changes: > > defaults write -app Skim SKAutoReloadFileUpdate -boolean true > > This works beautifully on normal PDFs generated by LaTeX, allowing me > to observe the typset results automatically. > > Now I'd like to have Skim watch PDFs modified on another computer and > passed through dropbox (dropbox.com). However, Skim does not update > on the files in the dropbox directory. I'm guessing that dropbox > deletes the file and then writes a new one instead of overwriting and > that Skim can only handle the latter. > > Is there a way to make Skim respond directly to modified PDF files in > a dropbox directory? > > (Interestingly our atchange program does detect a change in the > dropbox directory even through a soft link and if atchange is > programmed to copy the PDF to a new location, Skim will update on the > copy. The effect is that I can modify a PDF on my iPad with > goodreader, sync and the copy PDF viewed by skim automatically changes > on my computer screen. Of course it would be nice to avoid these > extra steps.) > > Tom > > Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D. > Senior Investigator > National Institutes of Health > National Cancer Institute > Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory > Molecular Information Theory Group > Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201 > 301-846-5581 > http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent)
If that's what Dropbox does, than there's no way to fix that. When the file is deleted there's nothing to follow. We cannot know what will happen to a file location in the future, if anything, and we can predict even less what the document itself will do, as that's a black box. Therefore Skim is conservative, and will not update when there can be any doubt, starting from the principle that doing things wrongly is worse than not doing things (especially something that is non-standard and goes against the system behavior, such as this.) The only way to safely follow and update files is if Apple would support it, because they are the only ones that know what happens in the internals. But they don't. Christiaan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Skim-app-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users
