University of Alaska Fairbanks
Geophysical Institute

Ronni Grapenthin - Toolbox

latex_demon - get almost WYSIWYG LaTeX

This is more of a tutorial than an actual tool. Two things are necessary to get a more instant LaTeX experience:

• a pdf viewer that automatically reloads a changed document, e.g. evince. Acrobat Reader will complain.
• a script that runs in the background and compiles your document repeatedly. See example below:
  for latex:

  			#!/bin/tcsh
  
  			while ( 1 > 0 )
  				pslatex $1
  				dvips -Ppdf ${1}.dvi -o ${1}.ps
  				ps2pdf ${1}.ps ${1}.pdf
  				sleep 10
  			end
  			

  or for pdflatex:

  			#!/bin/tcsh
  
  			while ( 1 > 0 )
  				pdflatex ${1} 
  				sleep 10
  			end
  			

  Obviously either of these 'demons' is from the commandline called as something like: latex_demon your_document.tex. They do the usual tex-document processing at the end of which they take a 10 second break before they continue the infinite while loop. Of course, the pause interval could be parameterized as well.