When working with Prince, I try out some styles in the stylesheet and Save it. Then I:

* Switch to Prince
* Close the old Preview
* Click Go to generate a new Preview
* Click View to see the new Preview

Doing all this puts a big delay in the "feedback loop" I'm using to fine tune the different styles. It would be great if all of those steps could be automated. At the very least, there should be a one-click button on the toolbar to automatically generate a new preview and display it.

Better would be to check for file updates and then do this automatically. In Windows, there's an API to notify about file changes; alternatively, you could just poll every second. A checkbox in the toolbar could turn autoupdate on and off.

This feautre would basically deliver to Prince the interactivity that WYSIWYG tools have, while still retaining Prince's superiority!

Any feedback from YesLogic on this? At the least, it's just an additional toolbar button - combining three buttons and tab switches in one action - and it would greatly improve the usability.

(The automatic file watching / polling could wait till Prince 7)

We will investigate this for the next release.

Sorry, we didn't get to add this feature to 6.0 rev 7, but we're definitely keeping it in mind for Prince 7.0.

I have a working solution for this. If you program in VB.NET I can send you source. Let Michael know and he can put you in touch with me.

Jim Albright
Wycliffe Bible Translators

I've got this running in my web app.

text editor with html/css
browser with acrobat reader on the pdf url

edit text, refresh browser - pdf is updated - super speedy

written in ruby (sinatra)

in fact the whole app is a report engine - I have a C++ app that sends a http/json request and the engine returns a pdf

Jim, Gums, Michael:

Yes, I'm definitely interested in seeing your solutions. Can you please let me know what you have? (You can PM me at gmail, using srobertjames at...).

I've used inotify to do this under Linux (Ubuntu).

Install the inotify-tools package

sudo apt-get install inotify-tools

And use the following script:

jez@jez-ubuntu:~/bin$ cat princewatch 
#!/bin/bash

while inotifywait -e close_write $1 ; do  prince $1; done

Now run

princewatch myfile.html

The PDF is now updated whenever I hit save in my editor. Evince, the default Gnome PDF viewer, will redraw the PDF automatically.

Neat! Anyway to do this with Adobe Acrobat and Windows?

And Mac OS X?