Autocompiling LaTeX-files under Linux
To automatically compile files under Linux there are several options available: Gummi (gummi.midnightcoding.org/) is an editor that compiles the LaTeX file whenever it is modified; latexmk (http://www.ctan.org/pkg/latexmk) is another option.
A third option uses Linux‘ inotify
, part of the Linux kernel. It tracks changes to files or directories on the filesystem level. For more information see the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify
Here’s a short tutorial how to get it to work under Ubuntu/Debian:
- Install inotify-tools using sudo apt-get install inotify-tools
- Run the following line from the terminal to tell inotify to watch for any changes of the TeX-file (change the name if necessary). I use a simple pdflatex here, make or arara are of course fine as well.
while true; do inotifywait -e modify autocomp1.tex && pdflatex autocomp1.tex; done |
Unfortunately it does not work with TeXworks‘ built-in document viewer, it does not recognize that the PDF has been modified externally.