[ESS] [Solved] Re: pdfLaTeX from ESS/Noweb opens shell window (XP)

[Nick Bell]

On 25/03/2010 08:57, Martin Maechler wrote:
> Well, I'm not Windozer but  M-n P calls  (ess-swv-PDF ..) and that is
> defined in lisp/ess-swv.el, and on line 173 has (call-process
> "pdflatex" nil tex-buf 1 latex-filename))
>
> where call-process is an Emacs-internal function {  C-h f
> call-process     explains the arguments (call-process
> program&optional infile buffer display&rest args) and more } Could
> you try changing the 'display' argument to call-process,i.e.,
> replace (call-process "pdflatex" nil tex-buf 1 latex-filename)) by
> (call-process "pdflatex" nil tex-buf nil latex-filename))
>
> (and *remove* the ess-swv.elc file {or remake it}) and see if that
> helps under Windoze?
>
> In general (i.e. under reasonable OS es) I'd still prefer to *see*
> the pdflatex happening, i.e., keep display set to non-nil, but we
> could set it to nil for Windows.

Thanks Martin. The problem was actually a few lines down: shell-command 
was calling pdfviewer which by default is "open.exe" which appears to 
open a shell. In any case, I don't want any viewer to open when I 
compile to PDF, so all I did was modify ess-swv.el thus:

    (if (not (= 0 pdf-status))
	(message "** OOPS: error in 'pdflatex' (%d)!" pdf-status)
       ;; else: pdflatex probably ok
      (message "PDF %s%s generated." namestem ".pdf"))
;;      (shell-command (concat
;;	(if (and ess-microsoft-p (w32-shell-dos-semantics))
;;	    "start \"" pdfviewer "\" \"" namestem ".pdf\""
;;	          "\"" pdfviewer "\" \"" namestem ".pdf\" &"))))

... to print a reassuring message if all goes well. I then use 
SumatraPDF to view the PDF, as it updates itself.

On my Macs I use the beautiful Skim.app, but my work laptop 
unfortunately runs Windows.

Thanks again.

Nick
-- 
Nick Bell
mail at nickbell.org