SyncTeX and pdf-view-mode for emacs
Back in the days of yore, when I was switching between my Windows machine and a
Linux machine, I remember having
SyncTeX active in my
Windows machine. It was a wonderful experience: SyncTeX lets you click
anywhere on a generated file from LaTeX and gets back to your editor, to the
place generating where you clicked. This was extremely useful, specially later
on when you need to adjust many formulas to fit and you need a bit of
back-and-forth-ing.
Then I got a Mac, and since Preview is so handy I slowly forgot about
SyncTeX. Time went on, and I merrily kept on editing LaTeX files as usual. I
even managed to deliver my PhD dissertation a couple weeks ago, the formal
speech will be in a month or two (come at your own
risk). AucTeX’s
preview saved most of the
days, so I slowly even forgot SyncTeX existed. Shame on me indeed.
The other day I got an annotated PDF from one of my advisors, and I just
couldn’t open the annotations. I tried all programs I had for Mac, and no luck:
annotations weren’t showing, just saw the icons. Surveying for some command-line
tool to extract annotations (just in case) I found
pdf-tools, a replacement for DocView
based on Poppler. It had the awesome ability
of actually displaying annotations, with it it was pretty clear the annotations
were broken in that PDF. I got a new set of PDFs from my advisor with the
annotations in place, though. While waiting for it to arrive…
I saw SyncTeX was an option of pdf-tools. I had been using that, hadn’t I?
So, I activated SyncTeX in AucTeX (it is TeX-source-correlate-method, see
here)
and indeed: I could have two frames, one with the actual LaTeX sources and the
other with a PDF, and go from one to the other. Even hyperreferences in PDF
work. See (well, click on the full-screen mode to see it larger or you won’t see
anything) here:
Getting pdf-tools to work wasn’t incredibly tricky (given the hoops you need
for some packages, sometimes). Just
brew install pdf-tools
and after reading
brew info pdf-tools
I was told to run
emacs -Q --batch --eval "(package-install-file \"/usr/local/Cellar/pdf-tools/0.60/pdf-tools-0.60.tar\")"
and this does the trick (well, change emacs for your actual emacs, which likely
is /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs) You’ll also need to add to
your .emacs file (or temporarily in your *scratch* buffer)
(setenv "PKG\_CONFIG\_PATH"
(concat
"/usr/local/Cellar/zlib/1.2.8/lib/pkgconfig"
":"
"/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig"))
(getenv "PKG_CONFIG_PATH")
and run
(pdf-tools-install)
as advised in the package’s README. And that’s it, open a PDF and activate pdf-view-mode to check everything is in place. Well worth it!
Note: Post-2018 you are better served by installing spacemacs, which comes with pdftools already set up for your enjoyment