Useful Notes

These are some random notes that might be of use to someone.

LaTeX Tips

Do your fingers ache after hammering C-c C-c repeatedly in Emacs just to compile and view your LaTeX document? Mine did, so I finally decided to move into the 21st century and let the computer do it for me.

If you use the MiKTeX Windows distribution there is a neat program called texify that basically does the work for you. It runs BibTeX and LaTeX until all the references have been resolved, and by passing a flag, it will also display the result. The only thing left is to bind a key in Emacs. I bound C-c v to a function that saves the current buffer, runs texify, and gets rid of the shell command output buffer. If you figure out a better way of hiding the output buffer, please tell me.

(global-set-key "C-cv" 'one-key-latex)
(defun one-key-latex ()
  (interactive "")
  (save-buffer)
  (shell-command "texify --run-viewer c:\path-to-your-tex-file\file.tex")
  (switch-to-buffer "file.tex")
  (enlarge-window 26))