As suggested here, latexmk
is a handy way to continually compile your document whenever the source changes. But often when you're working on a document you'll end up with errors and then latex
will panic and wait for user input before continuing. That can get very annoying, especially recently when I hacked up something to compile latex
directly from an etherpad document, which saves continuously as you type.
Is there a setting for latex
or latexmk
to make it just abort with an error message if it can't compile? Or, if necessary, how would I set up some kind of Expect script to auto-dismiss LaTeX's complaints?
(I had thought pdflatex
's option -halt-on-error
would do the trick but apparently not.)
Bonus question: Skim on Mac OSX is a nice pdf viewer that autorefreshes when the pdf changes (unlike Preview), except that whenever there's a latex error it makes you reconfirm that you want autorefreshing. Texniscope doesn't have this problem, but I had to ditch Texniscope for other reasons. Is there a way to make Skim always autorefresh, or is there another viewer that gets this right?
latexmk
based on the answer to this question:Get latexmk
here: http://www.phys.psu.edu/~collins/software/latexmk-jcc/
Add the following to your ~/.latexmkrc
file:
$pdflatex = 'pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode';
(For OS X with Skim)
$pdf_previewer = "open -a /Applications/Skim.app";
While editing your source file, foo.tex
, run the following in a terminal:
latexmk -pvc -pdf foo.tex
Use Skim or another realtime pdf viewer to view foo.pdf. For Skim, just look at the “Sync” tab in Skim’s preferences and set it up for your editor.
Voila! Hitting save on foo.tex
will now cause foo.pdf
to refresh without touching a thing.
The -halt-on-error option instructs the program to return a non-zero error code when an error is found. This is useful when you are e.g. calling latex from a script or from the make utility.
If your document compiles locally, but not on Overleaf, the most common causes are compilation timeouts, or the use of uncommon templates or packages that do not come standard with TeXLive. See here, for more details on compilation timeout errors.
With MikTeX, pdflatex
has this command-line option:
-interaction=MODE Set the interaction mode; MODE must be one of: batchmode, nonstopmode, scrollmode, errorstopmode.
Edit suggested by @9999years:
Those values are equivalent to a set of LaTeX \commands
that provide the same functionality.
From TeX usage tips:
The modes make TeX behave in the following way:
errorstopmode
stops on all errors, whether they are about errors in the source code or non-existent files.
scrollmode
doesn't stop on errors in the source but requests input when a more serious error like like a missing file occurs.In the somewhat misnamed
nonstopmode
, TeX does not request input after serious errors but stops altogether.
batchmode
prevents all output in addition to that (intended for use in automated scripts). In all cases, all errors are written to the log file (yourtexfile.log).
You can also put \nonstopmode
or \batchmode
at the very beginning of your tex file; then it'll work with any TeX version, not just pdflatex
. For more info on these and related commands see the very good reference on (raw) TeX commands by David Bausum. Especially the command from the debugging family could be of interest here.
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