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I'm using a dev version of Kile to take advantage of the new PDF-preview feature (not the snippet-preview you find in Kile 2.1, a full preview feature similar to other modern LaTeX editors like TeXmaker, etc.).

While the preview is offered by the Okular PDF reader, I'd like to change that to another PDF reader of my choice, does anybody know if it is possible?

giordano
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f.boc
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    Those voting to close should at least leave a comment to say why... – Andrew Swann Aug 07 '13 at 15:08
  • Is this OT? I saw some similar questions for other text editors so I posted mine too... – f.boc Aug 07 '13 at 15:34
  • Given that (a dev version of) Okular is listed as a prerequisite here I would guess that you must use Okular. – Torbjørn T. Aug 08 '13 at 07:04
  • @TorbjørnT. I looked at that page too, but it also says "This page was last modified on 21 December 2011, at 09:37." which is rather old. – Andrew Swann Aug 08 '13 at 07:22
  • @AndrewSwann Ah, didn't notice that bit. – Torbjørn T. Aug 08 '13 at 07:29
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    @f.boc Kile is an "LaTeX development environment" so generally on topic here. As you are asking about a dev version, I would guess the best place to get an answer is on the the Kile development list, but there may also be experts here who know. – Andrew Swann Aug 08 '13 at 07:47
  • @AndrewSwann I understand it is a dev version, but note also that Kile has a really slow release cycle and this "dev" version is in development from quite some time... Note also that this is the default version if you install Kile under Windows. Afaik Kile does not have an active forum/community, so I thought this was my best shot :) – f.boc Aug 09 '13 at 21:48
  • @TorbjørnT. My hope was that some expert knew a way to switch the internal viewer to something else, KDE related apps are usually highly configurable for those with the relevant knowledge (which I miss, obviously). – f.boc Aug 09 '13 at 21:50
  • There may be some Kile/KDE experts here, I don't know. You could always ask the Kile mailing list or SourceForge forum, see http://kile.sourceforge.net/contact.php for links. – Torbjørn T. Aug 10 '13 at 10:50

1 Answers1

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(this answer only works for Linux users, sorry)

There are two issues here.

If you have a problem with the previewer user interface provided by Okular, I think there is not much you can do. You would probably need to fork Kile entirely to change that.

If you have a problem with the PDF backend (poppler) you can compile a different PDF backend for Okular, that in turn will be used by the previewer inside Kile. As far as I know there are two alternative PDF backends for Okular:

1) muPDF backend: which will completely replace poppler and kind of works (I use it on a regular basis)

2) Cairo backend which will only replace the poppler subpixel font rendering with the one provided by Cairo

Your distribution may already provide packages for the alternative backends (for example, Arch does).

Since you've not stated what your specific problem is, I can't really tell if changing the rendering engine will solve your problem.

d-cmst
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  • this is easier than it seems, the problem was in the rendering so I solved switching to the mupdf backend. Thank you very much, this deserves a bounty! – f.boc Aug 24 '13 at 08:56
  • by the way, I noticed that after switching to mupdf, synctex does not work anymore. It seems it's not supported. – f.boc Aug 25 '13 at 19:06
  • yes, synctex support is not implemented. You can test the standalone muPDF app to see if it is a problem of the backend or the support is completely missing frm mupdf (I suspect this is the case). – d-cmst Aug 27 '13 at 05:55