[tex-live] configuring Xdvi

[George N. White III]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Lars Madsen <daleif at imf.au.dk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I need to reconfigure Xdvi a little to suit our system
>
> I usually add
>
> *wwwBrowser:    firefox
> XDvi*shrinkButton1: 2
> XDvi*shrinkButton2: 4
> XDvi*shrinkButton3: 6
> XDvi*shrinkButton4: 8
> XDvi*background: white
> XDvi*foreground: black
>
> at the end of XDvi
>
> but is texmf/xdvi
>
> the correct place to do this? Especially considering other site
> configurations changed with TL2008 such that we can have tlmgr.
>
> is there a better place to add the changes to XDvi?

xdvi is a shell script that runs:

xdviappfile=`kpsewhich -progname=xdvi --format='other text files' XDvi`

On my Solaris system, this gives:

<tl2008dir>/texmf-config/xdvi/XDvi

Since I'm in North America, the texmf-config version sets papersize
to letter, so a system that uses the default a4 paper might indeed
be using texmf/xdvi/XDvi, but texmf-config is the appropriate location
for a "configured" version of XDvi.   I'm not sure how tlmgr would deal
with an update -- since texmf/xdvi/XDvi might change, it may just
overwrite texmf-config/xdvi/XDvi with the new version and lose your
changes.   In the long run it would be nice to have a debian-style
tool that allowed you to view the diffs and decide whether to overwrite
your configured XDvi when installing updates.


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia