The Core Philosophy: 1-to-1 Correspondence#

Galley maintains a strict 1-to-1 correspondence between your TeX source and its PDF output. It enforces a single-window policy — one source, one PDF, one window — so that SyncTeX operations always target the correct context without ambiguity.

This is not an arbitrary constraint. It is what makes Forward Search and Inverse Search reliable: when there is exactly one window per source/PDF pair, every “jump” can be resolved unambiguously. As soon as you allow multiple windows for the same PDF, SyncTeX targets become ambiguous and the user has to disambiguate manually — exactly the kind of friction Galley is built to remove.