On Thu, 27 May 2021 at 14:21, Philip Taylor <p.tay...@hellenic-institute.uk> wrote:
> Over the past couple of days, I have made a substantial number of small > changes > to an MS Word document; on each occasion, as well as saving in MS Word > format > (.docx) I have also saved the document as Adobe PDF (.pdf). In the course > of so doing, > I have realised that MS Word can instruct Adobe Acrobat (and probably Adobe > Reader) > to close the PDF and then re-open it once the changes have been made. Is > there any > reason why the (x)dvipdfm(x) back-end to XeTeX cannot [be enhanced to] do > the same ? > Unlike UNIX-based OS's, Windows has problems writing to files that are open in another program, so Windows editors and AcroRead support "DynamicDataExchange" which allows a program that wants to write a PDF to ask AcroRead to close, and then open the file after it has been written. WinEDT can be configured to close the Adobe PDF viewer so that TeX software can write a new PDF. On Windows, TeX Live provides pdfopen and pdfclose programs (I think originally from fptex) that are useful in scripts (to bracket programs that create a pdf file): > type sample2e.cmd pdfclose sample2e.pdf lualatex sample2e pdfopen sample2e.pdf -- George N. White III