[ESS] Request: ess-swv.el

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Susumu" == Susumu Tanimura <aruminat at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Thu, 14 Dec 2006 13:38:27 +0900 writes:

    Susumu> Hi there,
    Susumu> With the current ess-swv.el in emacs-ess 5.3.3 it is hard to switch
    Susumu> the name of latex command, e.g. from latex to platex. There is no way
    Susumu> but modifying the ess-swv.el directly. It is happy if we can easily
    Susumu> redefine variables referring the name of latex command, dviware, and
    Susumu> postscript/pdf viewer.

Yes, you are right in principle.
There has been just a related enquire on the internal ESS-core
list, about a similar "requirement".

Note that
1) the postscript / pdf viewer's are already "searched for" in the
   development version of ESS (to become ESS-5.3.4).
   but there's no user configuration there either.

2) Yes, in principle we should really replace "latex" by a customizable
   variable, inside (ess-makeLatex).
   
However, there's some asymmetry and some assumptions in the current setup where
we have

 ess-makeLatex() -- to run "latex" on  foo.tex

 ess-makePS   () -- to 1) run "dvips" on  foo.dvi (assumption!)
		       2) run "gv" or another postscript viewer on foo.ps
 ess-makePDF  () -- to 1) run "pdflatex" on foo.tex
		       2) run some pdf viewer on the resulting foo.pdf

[asymmetry:  "latex -> view ps"  is two steps; where
	     "latex -> view pdf" is just one]

Problems can happen if we allow  customization:

- If you allow ess-makeLatex() not to produce 'dvi' anymore, then
  ess-makePS() won't work as expected any more, either.

- If you allow ess-makePDF() to not produce a 'pdf' by replacing
  "pdflatex" with something else, things go havoc as well.


It's not quite clear to me what should be done,
and I am really not sure if we'd want to try becoming as smart
as Auc-TeX about this.

Martin