LiTeX: A LaTeX plugin for Light Table

LiTeX is a plugin for Light Table providing support for LaTex documents. It features integrated compilation and a PDF viewer. Forward and reverse syncing between the editor and the viewer are provided with SyncTeX.

Install

LiTeX is available in the plugins repository. Alternatively, you can clone this repository into your plugins folder:

• Linux: ~/.config/LightTable/plugins/
• Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/LightTable/plugins/
• Windows: *%APPDATALOCAL%\LightTable\plugins*

You may need to reload your behaviors or restart Light Table to get everything loaded properly.

You'll need TeX installed, of course. For the internal PDF viewer, you also need the command-line programs pdftoppm and pdfinfo, part of Poppler. Linux users should find these in their repositories, if they aren't already installed. (On Debian-based systems, they're in the poppler-utils package.) On Macs, Poppler can be installed with brew install poppler. For Windows, I've found a build at alivate.com to work.

Usage

After loading a TeX file, the eval commands (see below) will save the file, run LaTeX on it, and display the resultant PDF in the integrated viewer. A forward sync command highlights the paragraph where your cursor is. (Hit Ctrl-Space and search for LiTeX: forward sync.) With Ctrl held, clicking on the PDF will perform a reverse sync and move the cursor to the relevant line in your editor.

There are two compilation options, named file and project. File is bound to the eval.one trigger (Ctrl-Enter by default) and project to eval (Ctrl-Shift-Enter), but they are otherwise identical. You may use one to compile individual files and the other for a large project, one to do a quick compilation and the other to fully regenerate the project, or something else. Each has three settings that you may set:

• filename: The name of the TeX file, for use in the next two settings. By default it's set to null, in which case the name of the current file is used, if it's a TeX file, or the name of the most recently compiled file. It can be a relative filename, in which case it is resolved relative to the directory containing the current file, or an absolute filename. You probably only need this if you're working on a project with several TeX files.

• commands: The commands to run. Either

  • a list of strings, each one a command to be run. The substitution patterns below will be replaced with values derived from filename.
  • one of "pdflatex" (the default), "latex-dvipdf", or "latex-dvips-ps2pdf", to call those commands with appropriate arguments.

• outputname: The name of the PDF file created by this command. The substitution patterns may be used, and the default is "%b.pdf".

Pattern	Substitution value
%f	name of file
%p	full path of file
%d	directory of file
%b	base name, without file extension
%e	file extension
%%	a percent sign

These settings are read from two JSON-formatted files, first litexrc in your configuration directory (~/.config on Linux, ~/Library/Application Support on Mac, or %APPDATALOCAL% on Windows) and then .litexrc in the current directory. The commands to edit LiTeX settings will open these files for you.These JSON object may have two attributes, "file" and "project", each of which may have attributes "filename", "commands", and "outputname". As an example:

{ "file": { "commands": "latex-dvipdf" },
  "project": { "filename": "main.tex",
               "commands": ["bibtex %b",
                            "pdflatex -halt-on-error --synctex=1 %f"] } }

If you are editing chapter1.tex, for example, and you press Ctrl-Enter, latex and dvipdf will be run on chapter1.tex, and the PDF viewer will open chatper1.pdf. When you press Ctrl-Shift-Enter, however, bibtex and pdflatex will be run on main.tex, and the PDF viewer will open main.pdf. If you switch to editing refs.bib, you can still build main.pdf with Ctrl-Shift-Enter.

Make sure that no commands will stop and wait for input if there is a problem, as LiTeX doesn't offer a way to enter input. Practically, this means you should call latex with the -interaction=nonstopmode or -interaction=batchmode options. LiTeX will stop processing as soon as a command returns a non-zero exit code. The PDF viewer will only be prompted to load the new PDF file if all commands exit without errors.

All commands are run from the directory containing filename. If you're doing something that requires commands run in several different directories, you're probably better off using makefiles or something like latexmk or rubber. Just set "commands": ["make"], and you should be all set.

External Viewers

LiTeX can use external PDF viewers in place of the internal one. The litexrc files also have a "PDF-viewer" attribute. Set to "internal", it uses the built-in viewer. Set it to a command to launch the PDF viewer of your choice. In addition to those above, the following substitution patterns may be used:

Pattern	Substitution value
%o	name of PDF file
%l	current line number
%c	current column number

The internal viewer contains a log viewer for reviewing the output of the compilation commands. When using an external viewer, this output is written to the Light Table console only when there is an error during compilation.

License

LiTeX is copyright 2014 Robert Schroll and others, released under the GPLv3. See the LICENSE file for details. The source is available at http://github.com/rschroll/litex.