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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

I just use overleaf. gets work done, easy to work with collaborators, does the package install thing automatically, real time preview of what your write, has dumb-person "rich text" mode etc.

Only downside is its cloud based so I can't be productive on an airplane.

https://www.overleaf.com/

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> real time preview of what you write

When I need that with a LaTeX document, I have vim with the TeX sources open on one half on the screen, and mupdf showing the compiled PDF on the other half, and a terminal in the background is running

  while inotifywait *.tex *.bib; do
    sleep 0.2
    pdflatex main && killall -HUP mupdf
  done

The sleep ensures that vim is finished writing the file before pdflatex runs. pdflatex is sometimes substituted for make or latexmk or whatever. SIGHUP makes mupdf reload the PDF. (If you're using e.g. Okular, it will pick up the changed PDF automatically, so that step can be skipped.)

(My intention is not to belittle cloud solutions, although maybe a little. :) Just to show how you can implement the real-time-preview feature with a very small shell script.)

Or if you're already using vim anyway, you can use a plugin like vimtex (https://github.com/lervag/vimtex) which automates the compiling after saving the file.

My setup us very similar! I used to do the inotify dance as well, but I now find it a lot easier to just use a vim autocmd on BufPostWrite. This is only reasonable if your document compiles relatively quickly, but one clear advantage is the immediate feedback when some error happens.

I also have a makefile to intelligently include custom macro files and run multiple passes when needed.

Couldn't be happier.

You can use

    inotifywait -e move_self,close_write *.tex *.bib

and drop the sleep. This also means you will not needlessly recompile the pdf if you re-open the source file in your editor.

Side note: Only one of move_self and close_write is actually required, depending on your editor. Some editors (e.g. vim, emacs), will write the modified content to a separate file, then rename it to the real file name (in order to make it atomic) => move_self. Others will overwrite the file in-place (e.g. gedit, nano) => close_write.

latexmk -pvc

FYI, you can simply clone an overleaf document using git, and work offline, pushing changes after:

https://www.overleaf.com/blog/195-new-collaborate-online-and...

> Only downside is its cloud based so I can't be productive on an airplane.

Other downside is that in-browser text editing sucks compared to what you can do (e.g.) with vim.

That looks very interesting. Can anyone compare to Sharelatex? I'm using that currently and have run into some issues - sometimes loosing server connection, creates unwanted edits in .tex file from just uploading, opening and downloading again. So far it always seems to be whitespace that it messes up.

Edit: Also Sharelatex leaves me wanting for more editing features. Most commonly, autocompletion for reference-tags based on labels in project. Kile does this perfectly, but it's a hassle to get it running everywhere.

> autocompletion for reference-tags based on labels in project.

Soon ;)

Just started using Overleaf as well. It actually has Git support, so if you want to use an offline editor for a while you can just pull changes to your machine, work on it, and then commit/push it to the cloud.

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