DDE Commands

DDE is an acronym for Dynamic Data Exchange, which is a mechanism of Windows for inter process communication (IPC). Applications can communicate via DDE. Though DDE is a very old mechanism, nearly all windows applications are supporting its commands.

Normally it is not possible to send DDE commands to an application manually (i.e. from a command line), but TeXnicCenter supports a special command line switch '/ddecmd' which sends the specified DDE commands to an already running instance of TeXnicCenter or if there is no instance running, starts up a new instance and execute the DDE commands for that new instance.

The following DDE commands are available:

[open("filename")]
  Opens the specified file.
  If the specified file is a project file, the project will be opened, otherwise the file will be opened in the editor.
[goto("filename", "linenumber")]
  Opens the file specified in the editor and places the cursor at the line specified.
[print("filename")]
  Prints the file specified to the default printer.
[printto("filename", "printer", "driver", "port")]
  Prints the file specified to the printer specified.