[texhax] adobe 10

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2011-05-28 at 11:09:35 +0200, Lars Madsen wrote:

 > On 05/27/2011 06:13 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
 > > On 2011-05-27 at 16:01:02 +0200, Lars Madsen wrote:
 > >
 > >   >  Aren't you refering to your editor instead? If that is the
 > >   >  case I'd also recommend looking at the Sumatra PDF viewer,
 > >   >  as it does not lock the PDF file as AR does, so the PDF
 > >   >  viewer can stay open during the entire writing/compilation
 > >   >  process.
 > >
 > > It's Windows that locks the file, not AR.
 > >
 > > Regards,
 > >    Reinhard
 > >
 > 
 > if it is windows, then why doesn't it lock it for Sumatra PDF?

Because Sumatra PDF loads the whole file into memory, and, if the file
is large, into swap space.  The actual file is closed and can be
deleted or replaced while the program is running. 

AR keeps the file opened and loads only those parts of the file into
memory which are actually needed.  This is accomplished by the
fseek(3) system call.  AR first jumps to the end of the file,
determines the start of the xref table, and loads it into memory.
With the xref table, every object can be accessed quickly, using
fseek() again.

On Unix you can delete a file while a process is using it.  Deleting a
file means removing its directory entry.  The file metadata are stored
in the inode, which persists until the last process accessing the
files dies.

On FAT file systems the file metadata are stored in the directory too.
There is no separate inode.  Hence, open files have to be locked.  
I suppose that NTFS itself doesn't have this limitation, but I don't
know which features of NTFS are currently supported by Windows.

BTW, AR is not the only program which suffers from file locking under
Windows.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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