SEEing LaTeX 2: Opening the PDF in a Viewer

Getting completions for citations in SubEthaEdit is easy. Of course, someone else did all the work for us, so it should be easy! Let's try something a little more ambitious.

I generally use pdflatex. Thanks to pdfsync, a number of editors can integrate nicely with PDF viewers, albeit the viewers themselves must incorporate support for pdfsync. So, let's try to set up pdfsync support for SubEthaEdit. I'll focus on integrating SubEthaEdit with my current viewer of choice, PDFView. Sadly, PDFView appears not to be supported any more, but it's still useful and the basic approach should be the same for any viewer. For now, I'll just focus on going from SubEthaEdit to PDFView.

The mechanism for linking SubEthaEdit to PDFVIew will be AppleScript. You can have PDFView display a particular LaTeX line using AppleScript, which is just what we need. The strategy then is to get the line number for the selection in SubEthaEdit, figure out the file name for the PDF, and then tell PDFView to show the line number we obtained from SubEthaEdit. According to the SubEthaEdit scripting guide, we also need to include a seescriptsettings handler. Here, I present something simple, without working too hard to catch errors:

tell application "SubEthaEdit"
    tellfront document
        set lineNumber to startLineNumber of selection
        set texFile to path
    end tell
end tell

set pdfFile to (text 1 through ((length of texFile) - 3) of texFile) & "pdf"

tell application "PDFView"
    activate
    display tex line lineNumber of file pdfFile
end tell

-- SubEthaEdit settings

on seescriptsettings()
    {displayName:"Show in PDFView", shortDisplayName:"PDFView", keyboardShortcut:"^~@o", toolbarIcon:"ToolbarPDFView.png", inDefaultToolbar:"yes", toolbarTooltip:"Opens PDF for document in PDFView", inContextMenu:"no"}
end seescriptsettings

I saved the above script as a compiled script into a copy of the LaTeX mode. Now, for a LaTeX document, the Mode menu in SubEthaEdit shows a script called "View in PDFView" which can be activated by a keyboard shortcut. It works well.

I also added an image to the LaTeX mode bundle to provide a toolbar item. I encountered some difficulties with this. The description in the scripting guide isn't very specific, it really just says to put images in the bundle. I got an appropriate image by copying the icon from the PDFView application bundle, and converting it to PNG (since that's what all the other images in SubEthaEdit mode bundles were). This didn't work. It took me some time to discover that the toolbar icon cannot be any size; the 128 by 128 pixel image I had simply didn't show up. Downsizing it to 32 by 32 using ImageWell solved the problem, providing a nice toolbar item. Of course, I normally leave the toolbar hidden, so I doubt I'll be using it much, but it is good to know how that works.

The script has a couple of oddities and shortcomings. The tell block for SubEthaEdit needs to get the selection and path for the front document. However, the scripting dictionary for SubEthaEdit has both documents containing windows and windows containing documents. Is tell front document the right thing to do? Should it be tell document of front window? Or maybe something else?

Also, I don't check to see if the document has been saved. I'm not really sure what the right solution is: unsaved changes won't be reflected in the PDF, anyway, so should I care? I'll revisit that later, assuming that I decide SubEthaEdit is suitable for my LaTeX needs.

Nor do I check to see if there is a document open at all. As far as I can tell, this is not an error. The script is mode dependent. Since the LaTeX mode is only active if there is a document open, there is thus no need to check.

The transformation of the LaTeX file path to a PDF file path is not done well. It should really be improved by properly splitting off the file extension, instead of just chopping off the last three characters and assuming we've gotten the file extension. While it is probably OK for LaTeX, I'm not sure if it could cause any problems. Again, this is something to fix later, once a more complete picture of editing LaTeX in SubEthaEdit takes shape.

The tell block for PDFView is weird. There aren't any changes I'd make, but it is just strange. If you open the script in Script Editor and compile it, the display tex line lineNumber of file pdfFile becomes display tex line lineNumber file pdfFile, which is syntactically invalid. However, you can run the script without first compiling, and it works fine. Which is really weird, because the script has to be compiled before running it, so it works once but fails the second time you run it. My solution was to do the editing in SubEthaEdit, compile it in Terminal using osacompile, and not worry about the matter. I suspect that the scripting dictionary in PDFView should just be considered in error, even though it can be made to work.

Next, I'll look at going the other direction, from PDFView to SubEthaEdit. A quite pleasant environment already looks possible.

Edit: Fixed formatting of included script.