Re: dwim as the value of TeX-master

[Hongyi Zhao]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2021 at 5:01 AM Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Hongyi Zhao <hongyi.zhao@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > The AUCTeX document on
> > <https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/manual/auctex/Multifile.html>
> > says the following:
> >
> > If the variable is dwim, AUCTeX will try to avoid querying by
> > attempting to “do what I mean”; and then change the file.
> >
> > But I'm still not so clear on the specific mechanism/algorithm denoted
> > by “do what I mean”.
>
> AUCTeX will look at the TeX-master values in all buffers whose file
> reside in the same directory as the current one

What will happen if the non-master files reside in sub-folders of the
master file's directory?

> and use the first
> TeX-master value which is a string (and so denotes the path to the
> master file).  That's based on the assumption that one usually has a
> layout like
>
>   main.tex # The master file where TeX-master is t which includes
>            # the individual chapter files.
>   chapter1.tex # TeX-master is "main.tex"
>   chapter2.tex # TeX-master is "main.tex"
>

This seems cumbersome due to I must set TeX-master for each of them.

> So when you now create a new chapter3.tex, it will most probably also
> want to have TeX-master set to "main.tex".
>
> Obviously, this dwim method can do wrong guesses when you have multiple
> multi-file documents in the same directory and work on several of them
> at once.
>

Maybe a more intelligent algorithm should be developed.

> HTH,
> Tassilo
>

Regards
-- 
Assoc. Prof. Hongyi Zhao <hongyi.zhao@gmail.com>
Theory and Simulation of Materials
Hebei Vocational University of Technology and Engineering
No. 473, Quannan West Street, Xindu District, Xingtai, Hebei province