5.3 Displaying new versions of a document

During document creation it is usually desirable to always display the newest version of the document in work.

Instead of explicitly loading it via the file selection popup the most recent version can be displayed by pressing the Reload button in the main window. Choosing the Reload entry in the menu that pops up when clicking with the third mouse button anywhere on the displayed page certainly has the same effect.

More comfortable is the "Watch File" feature which may be switched on by selecting the corresponding entry in the State menu. If activated gv will check every now and then if a new version of the displayed file exists. If so it will be displayed automatically. By default the file is checked about once every second.

Finally it may also be left to the document creating program to trigger gv to update its display. To do so the program should send the SIGHUP signal to gv. For instance at the end of a shell script generating a postscript file from latex sources the line

   kill -SIGHUP <gv_pid>

may be added (here gv_pid is the process id of gv). Executing the script and thereby creating a new version of the document will then also cause the result to be displayed instantaneously. Please note that this feature is available only on X11 R6 based systems.