Hi Hussein, I understand that "start" means start the process and don't wait until it exits. That's exactly why I'd like to use it. (I'm not sure why you say invoking Ant implies using "run" instead of "start". Seems like both commands should be compatible, depending on whether you want synchronous or asynchronous behavior.)
But what I'm wondering is why the process takes so long to actually start running with the "start" command. And as I said, sometimes it never starts at all. It seems that it's given an extremely low priority in the system. Is there any way to prioritize it higher? Thanks, Mark -----Original Message----- From: Hussein Shafie [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 2:09 AM To: Mark Fletcher Cc: xmleditor-support at xmlmind.com Subject: Re: Question about "start" command Mark Fletcher wrote: > > I'm doing some "beta-testing" of XXE in conjunction with DITA and the > Open Toolkit to give my users a chance to get familiar with the tool > unitl your DITA version becomes available. > > I'm using using your command tags to perform a PDF conversion of an > XML file and then open the file in Acrobat. It works just fine using > either the <shell> or <command name="run"> tags. However, because the > Ant target I'm invoking subsequently launches Acrobat, the XXE process > (and command dialogs) remains open until Acrobat is closed. > > When I found your "start" command, I thought that would solve this > problem. But it doesn't seem to work very well. In Task Manager, I > can see that the process has been spawned, but it takes forever to > finish, if at all. Sometimes it seems like I have to submit the > command numerous times before Acrobat finally starts. Is this a bug? > Or is there some way to improve the performance or declare the priority of the process? No, there is no bug here. Command "run" means start process and wait until it exits. Command "start" means start process, don't wait until it exits. This command is a launcher[*] in fact. In you case, invoking ant implies using command "run", not command "start". Unfortunately, the fact that ant invokes acroread for the target you have chosen is *incompatible* with command "run"; and I'm affraid there is *no* *solution* for this problem in XXE. That's why we think that, in the future, ant tasks found in the DITA Open Toolkit should *not* be used in XXE to implement processing of DITA maps. We need to replace those by XXE ``native'' "process" commands. --- [*] An alternative is command "viewHTML" (which works for PDF too!).
