LaTeX is super fun. It really makes your document, resume or thesis, whatever you are writing, appear clear and well organized. However, it may become a bit of an issue when you are frequently making adjustments to the layout of the document and need to preview updates in realtime. If you are using an IDE, then hopefully it’s not much of an issue to you since many LaTeX editors already include this feature. However, if you are a command line native, switching back and forth between document and terminal to recompile files might be a painful process.
That’s when I found out about the cool feature of latexmk.
latexmk is independent of the editor, really --- it's a script that watches the files needed to compile a latex document and re-run the compilation when needed. Configuration is a bit complex, but it is a really useful tool.
Here’s a demo setup taken from this StackOverflow answer:
$pdf_previewer = "start evince";
$pdf_pdf_update_method = 0;
$dvi_mode = 0;
$pdf_mode = 1;
$preview_continuous_mode = 1;
$pdflatex = "xelatex %O %S";
Just put this content into a latexmkrc file in the root of your LaTeX project
and run latexmk <your file> to see its magic. Every saved change triggers an
autocompile and preview in your favorite document viewer (well, evince seems to
work just great!).
I prefer this method over tons of node packages and shell scripts out there
cause it really works flawlessly.
Hope you find it useful.