Re: [PATCH 0/3] synctex support for pdf export

[Andreas Leha <andreas.leha@med.uni-goettingen.de>]

Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> Aaron Ecay <aaronecay@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> This patch series is an attempt to add synctex support to org mode.
>
> Thank you for your patch.
>
>> I have not tested this code extensively, but it does work for me.  I
>> don't know if it works for async export or not, since I haven't set up
>> a working environment for that.
>
> Async export works out of-the-box (though not optimized). There's no
> special environment to set up.
>
>> There are currently limitations.  The granularity of the jumping is
>> not great, because of the way the parser works.  It will get you into
>> the paragraph corresponding to the PDF location, but no closer (with
>> pure latex, you will arrive at the exact line in the tex file).  You
>> also have to run org-latex-patch-synctex manually, unless you use the
>> direct-to-pdf export option (C-c C-e l p).  In regular latex, beamer
>> documents have somewhat degraded synctex granularity (in general, you
>> don't get to the exact source line, but only somewhere between
>> \begin{frame} and \end{frame}).  This may be compounded by the bad
>> granularity of this patch -- I have not tested this combo very much.
>
> [...]
>
> As you notice, there are many limitations and I agree some of them will
> be tedious to overcome. It also breaks asynchronous export.
>
> Moreover, modifying both parser and core export framework for an
> optional feature within a single back-end family is not right, IMO.
>
> While I acknowledge the investment put into this patch, I won't accept
> it in its current form. I might consider it if it only modifies
> ox-latex.el, handles include keywords and buffer modifications through
> Babel, and doesn't break asynchronous export. Not relying on text
> properties is a real plus.
>
> Though, don't push it too hard, I'm really not sure it's worth the
> trouble.
>
>
> Regards,


Hi Nicolas,

I understand all your points very well:  Too heavy changes for an
optional and still feature-incomplete patch targeting a sub-group of users.

But the provided functionality would be really handy for everybody
who writes larger documents (like a thesis) with org-mode and has to
incorporate comments made to the pdf.

This feature has been asked for on this list
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2010-08/msg01253.html
and on stackoverflow
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9965049/how-to-use-synctex-with-org-mode

So I just want to contradict your last statement:  IMO it's worth the
trouble to get this working in orgmode.

Best,
Andreas