Change and show PDF with TeX “immediately,” and link I/O

This page addresses approaching WYSIWYG with TeX plus some “ordinary TeX previewer” by smart reprocessing of TeX’s output files (of text/.txt/ASCII type). Aspects of this include placing the editor cursor automatically at the code line that generated a certain passage in the screen preview of the document (“editor-previewer synchronization”).

This page owes a lot to James Quirk, Jim Diamond, Tom Schneider, and Martin Sievers.

1. Running TeX (the typesetting engine) once on the main source typically does not suffice. Another TeX run (or still another) may be needed, maybe preceded by running BibTeX and/or makeindex etc.
   • Approaches at doing this automatically are discussed in the UK TeX FAQ, reminding of the general make utility.
     • AutoLaTeX – “automate generation of large scale LaTeX projects,” set of Make and Perl scripts,
     • latex-make (new on CTAN 2009/09/30, documentation 2008/01/28; Debian “sid”, Debian “lenny”; “several tools”),
     • latexmake – “LaTeX Makefile” (last update 2001, E. McLean, D.J. Musliner, & Tong Sun),
     • latexmk (last update 2012-11-11, J. Collins after E. McLean & D.J. Musliner, cf. obsolete LatexMk by E. McLean after D.J. Musliner’s go),
     • mk – “Make for LaTeX,” Ruby script — ? in 2015, it is a Bash script with caption “a TeX and LaTeX maker” (CTAN-location support/latex_maker),
     • texi2dvi from texinfo, and texify from MiKTeX

     are mentioned.

   • Moreover, there is the atchange program. Actually, the latter page seems to be a much more comprehensive attempt at covering the task of the present page, and even at a much more general task. The page has a section on LaTeX, entitled “LaTeX with Atchange: A Typesetting WYSIWYG!”. (Also search the texhax archive for ‘atchange’).
   • latexn (a C Shell script) seems to be another LaTeX-make not mentioned in the UK FAQ.
   • prv was similar, while declared obsolete by its author now, referring to his mk (mentioned above) and vpp.
   • What about rake4latex, as compared to mk?
   • And what about shlatex?
   • arara automates TeX using source file content, new 2013-02-05.
   • LaTeXDaemon for Windows is another tool not on CTAN doing such things, additionally aiming at speed (recommended by Martin Heller on texhax).
   • On xpt.sourceforge.net (not on CTAN, cf. “Sun Tong’s old_home” and his latexmake above), there is LatexMake, with a report on similar tools:
     • some “big Makefile” by some Stefan van den Oort
     • that obsolete LatexMk by E. McLean mentioned above
     • LaTeX-Mk on latex-mk.sourceforge.net (v2.0 as of April 5, 2010, D. McMahill)
     • Rubber (home | ManPage — stack... comparisons)

   • Lars Marowski-Brée has some LaTeX-Make on his site.
   • Philipp Lehman’s logreq seemingly supporting such things is new on CTAN 2010/08/05.
   • Claudio Beccari’s imakeidx seems to save you from rerunning for indexes.
   • According to Torsten Wagner’s texhax posting 2010/09/14, some “editors” provide a similar functionality—sometimes failing. (It had a little mistake, see confession.)

2. Speed: For speeding-up compilation, (part of) the LaTeX preamble (loading packages/macros) may be moved into the format:^{[Martin Sievers 2010/05/04]}
   • LaTeXDaemon for Windows
   • mylatex | mylatexformat
   • AUCTeX/preview-latex (CTAN infos) which also provides quick preview to tables, formulas, and graphics.

3. DVI reload:  Having rerun “TeX completely” in a way alluded to previously, you just need to move to the “DVI preview” window now, which may show YAP or xdvi nowadays. Usually, this shows exactly the result of your most recent code change. I am not sure in the case of changing a macro definition … actually, it seems that the DVI just is reloaded to the same page (and position) as before.
4. PDF reload:  The same feature with PDF (replacing DVI) may be less easy to obtain. This, or “how to get a PDF to reload to the same page when the file changes” , has been addressed on the texhax mailing list starting with Tom Schneider’s controlling pdf reader (Apr 18, 2010).
   • James Quirk answered alluding to another project of his interesting here, as well as pointing out that Linux Adobe Acrobat 9.x (AR9) has a reload feature with key short-cut Ctrl-R.
   • I mentioned the PDF reload feature from Alexander Grahn’s acroreloadpdf for Linux (a JavaScript adding a “Reload” item to the “Files” menu of AR8, cf. below). As James answered, there had been a discussion about acroreloadpdf (addressing a shortcoming) on the pdftex mailing list. It started there with Alexander Grahn (Jan 22, 2009) who added that it will not work with Windows.
   • According to James (Apr 18, 2010), AR has another problem with Mac OS X. According to David Romano (on texhax) however, Skim for Mac OS X has the reload feature and even allows “pdfsync” (with Aquamacs).—Tom Schneider added a script for Skim; and here is something relevant on MacVim.
   • According to John Culleton (Jan 22, 2009 on the pdftex list), KPDF for KDE (even Windows—cross-platform!) possesses the same “reload” feature. He there explains how to use it with the Gvim editor.
   • According to Ahmed El-Mahmoudy (next message on pdftex list) Evince for GNOME is another PDF (and others) viewer with that “reload” functionality.
   • According to Wikipedia, Sumatra PDF has the same feature.
   • Mysteriously, xpdfopen for the X Window System, (now) dealing with the reloading feature of AR9, was updated on Apr 19, 2010. The same day, latexmk (see above) was updated. xpdfopen’s author, Jim Diamond, now has reported that it makes AR5, AR7, AR8, AR9, and xpdf reload automagically.
   • James Quirk points at another discussion of reloading where he and others have posted solutions and according to which the reload feature (to the same page) has been present with AR just apart from AR8.
   • A “poor man’s” solution using hyperref’s pdfstartpage option has been discussed in a German newsgroup.
   • As some upshot, it seems (to me) that the “reload” feature of PDF viewers is becoming standard on UNIX-like systems right these days. Even on Windows it can be achieved with KPDF (xpdfopen?). TODO: find out for all PDF Readers according to the Wikipedia category – moreover VTeX …
   • Reworking needed: OK, the previous list needs to be made more concise. And I missed a distinction Tom made somewhere: The viewer should not just reload with a key combination, but automatically when a source file/the PDF file changed (again the DVI viewers YAP and xdvi have shown this “automatic reload” feature for some longer time).

5. Editor-Previewer Synchronization:  The iTeXMac-pdfsync page explains the notion of editor-previewer synchronization (for the case of PDF previewers):
   • “[…] helps you finding what part of the output corresponds to what line of the source file, […]”
   • “[…] and conversely what line of the source file corresponds to a location of a given page in the output.” (The page says that 2007 is “now” while locating last revision in 2004.) This “converse” feature needs support implementation in the editor (the named page lists some of this kind).

   The Xdvi(k) SourceForge page describes the latter feature as inverse (or also “reverse”) search, the former one as forward search (also called “direct search”), and names editors like AUCTeX supporting inverse search as well.

   • For DVI output, besides Xdvi also the YAP supports inverse search, cf. TeXlips as well.
   • Stefan Ulrich’s srcltx package (going back to Aleksander Simonic, the author of WinEdt) supports the feature with DVI.
   • Jérôme Laurens’ LaTeX package pdfsync implements the feature with pdfTeX and XeTeX, explained on a SourceForge page.
   • Heiko Oberdiek’s vpe package implements the feature for pdfTeX, VTeX, and generating PDF from DVI via the dvips driver.
   • Regarding the same VTeX, the iTeXMac-pdfsync page reports that it has the “pdfsync” feature.
   • SyncTeX is a another synchronization method by the author of pdfsync. (synctex-parser is the C code of a parser for SyncTeX output.)
   • In his 2007 PracTeX paper, Jérôme Laurens describes three synchronization methods for generating PDF with TeX, including pdfsync and TeXShop’s method, and argues that TeX’s architecture is fundamentally unable to attain better WYSIWYG functionality. In his 2008 TUGboat paper, he desribes SyncTeX and gives a more general historical overview of synchronization techniques.
   • The Wikipedia article on inverse search may give a more general picture …

Please report corrections, amendments, and suggestions to uwe “dot” lueck “at” web “dot” de!

Last revised 2015-09-24 © Uwe Lück

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