My LaTeX "ide"

I haven’t found a LaTeX IDE that I am happy with (texmaker comes close, but I don’t like the fact that it doesn’t properly underline the trigger letter in menus, even if Windows is set to do that), and so I ended up defaulting to just editing my book and papers with notepad++ and running pdflatex manually. But it’s a bit of a nuisance to get the preview: ctrl-s to save, alt-tab to command-line, up-arrow and enter to re-run pdflatex, alt-tab to pdf viewer. So I wrote a little python script that watches my current directory and if any .tex file changes in it, it re-runs pdflatex. So now it’s just ctrl-s, alt-tab to get the preview. I guess it’s only four keystrokes saved, but it feels more seamless and straightforward. The script also launches notepad++ and my pdf viewer at the start of the session to save me some typing.

An experiment in book writing and crowdsourcing comments

I am working away at Infinity, Causation and Paradox, and am about half way to the first draft. As an experiment, I am putting all my in-progress materials on github. There is both TeX source and a periodically updated pdf file of the whole thing (click on "document.pdf" and choose "Raw").

To report bugs, i.e., philosophical errors, nonsequiturs, typos, etc., or to make improvement suggestions, click on "Issues" at the top of the github page (preferred), or just email me.

I will be committing new material to the repository after each days' work on the book. Click on the commit description to see what I've added. If you must quote from the manuscript, explicitly say that you are quoting from "an in-progress early draft".

Please bear in mind that this is super rough. A gradually growing first draft.

Please note that while you're permitted to download the material for your personal use only, you are not permitted to redistribute any material. The repository may disappear at any time (and in particular when the draft is ready for initial submission).

TeXlipse

I've been editing LaTeX files using an old version of WinEdt. But at least in the old version I was using, I was having a terrible time ensuring things like matching \begin{...} and \end{...} for frame and itemize blocks when editing Beamer presentations. But I think I finally found a better way to handle LaTeX: the TeXlipse plugin for Eclipse. I can now have background building (at least when I save, and I press ctrl-s quite often instinctually), syntax highlighting and indenting, autocomplete, a handy hierarchical view, and very nice handling of error messages.

The downsides are that you need Eclipse (but I have it already installed for Android software development, and it is free after all) and Eclipse is bloated and doesn't start fast, setting up a new project takes a few more clicks than before, and the PDF viewer that comes with TeXlipse doesn't show all the graphical elements in a Beamer file. The last is a nuisance, but the nice way that the PDF file is linked with the LaTeX source compensates for it, as does the fact that I can just set up SumatraPDF as a secondary PDF viewer, and SumatraPDF (unlike Acrobat) will automatically reload the pdf file when it is regenerated. All in all, it seems worthwhile.