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Comment by latk | Hacker News Reader

You are correct in stating that LaTeX is no silver bullet. The clear disadvantage of LaTeX is the tweak-recompile cycle, whereas graphical tools have instant feedback which is more suitable for design. But for automated typography (≠ design), it is still unsurpassed after all those years.

The default LaTeX styles are still way prettier and easier to read than the random muck (12pt Times, small margins) that would be more widespread otherwise. For scientific papers this is truly awesome, especially when the author does not care about typography. But you are right, LaTeX is not the correct tool for every job.

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Now, if we can just get LaTex with instant feedback, we can approach the best of both worlds.

I use latexmk and coupled with a script which uses inotifywait. Evice automatically reloads the PDF on changes, so I get semi-instant feedback. Works okay for me.

On the off chance you're not aware of it,

  latexmk -pdf -pvc file.tex

does essentially that. If you like Unicode in your source (infinitely more readable and exactly the same keystrokes in Emacs)

  latexmk -xelatex -pvc source.tex

works.

IIRC, isn't Lyx what you are looking for ?

I never used it so I might be wrong.

-- Edit: http://www.lyx.org/

LyX is halfway there. It is a visual editor for LaTeX, but it does not actually show the final result. Instead, it operates on an intermediate representation. Stuff like section headings, math environments and tables are shown correctly (unless you use non-standard features), but margins and spacings are not. Ergo it isn't suitable for designing, or nitpicky typography. It calls this approach WYSIWYM – what you see is what you mean.

The user experience is quite similar to your regular word processor, except that the “paper” metapher is removed.

I tried it out for a while, but I feel more productive (and more in control) when using a regular editor with nice syntax highlighting.

The IPython notebook almost does it, using LaTeX for math and markdown for text. There are still a few issues at the moment, particularly lack of references, that keep me from doing real technical articles entirely from within the notebook.

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

Give Gummi a try if you haven't. Its automatically updating preview pane might have what you are looking for.

http://dev.midnightcoding.org/projects/gummi

I've added

  map <F4> :!pdflatex %

to my tex.vim. It's on demand, but after the first compilation it's almost instant. :)

Edit: as mentioned in another comment, Evince updates automatically when the file changes.

> Now, if we can just get LaTex with instant feedback, we can approach the best of both worlds.

Okay, try this: http://arachnoid.com/latex

It's not ideal, but it's a start on something that could be much more powerful.

On Linux, inotify, pdflatex, and evince combine in the expected way. I edit with vim and :w and it does the work in the background. Strictly, I use a Makefile and make, but that's not a real difference.

I keep meaning to dig into this sort of write-based build trigger, and I'm going to grab this excuse. As I understand it, inotify is a syscall, right? Do you have custom C code to hook it and trigger your make? What are the standard options for command-line access to inotify? Rudimentary googling suggests incron or watcher (not watch). Any other advice?

Hmn, how the heck did I miss all these related google results the last few times I tried to research this. I start looking at things like libnotify and can't help but notice while such technologies seem to be focused on other kinds of events, they seem like they might work for this kind of file-watching thing.

[inotify-tools](https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki) is the stuff you want. There's a nice utility called inotifywait in there which will block until there's a change in a file or directory (it does recursive as well).

You can get results from as simple as this bash one-liner:

     while(true); do inotifywait --exclude '.*.swp' -e close_write dir; make; done

I wrote that off the top of my head so it may not work straight off, but you get the idea.

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