Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jun 2007, William Adams wrote:
Most pdf viewers will maintain a file lock which will prevent the file from
being over-written.
What ones?
I'd guess most LyX users do like I do and create new PDFs continually
while their PDF viewer is still open.
Some PDF viewers have behaviour to reload updated PDFs automatically
(which is just the opposite of forcing a file lock).
My experience is with evince, xpdf, epdfview, gv, ggv, gpdf, and others
and I don't recall this locking issue.
Also how is the file lock done? File locking makes a lot of assumptions
and often doesn't work on some systems for some file systems. A reliable
way of doing file locking is to create a lock file (a separate dummy
file); if that is the case, what is it called?
I think they were talking about windows. Windows has
a system call API for locking files like this, without creating
any special lockfile.
People making pdf viewers for windows sometimes uses this
API - for some strange unknown reason. Looks like a bug,
except that they can't possibly have done that by accident . . .
Attempting to google for this topic mostly turns up about PDFs that are
protected so others can't view without authenticating.
But now I read that Adobe reader locks files. (I don't use Adobe.) So I
guess the solution is not to use Adobe :)
Yes, good idea. Adobe don't lock files on linux - because
linux don't have an API for this kind of lock. There are other
reasons for staying away from acrobat though.
Helge Hafting
