Errors/Warnings in LaTeX Output

Question

I use Vim to edit LaTeX documents and pdflatex to compile the documents. One problem with using pdflatex is that it takes time to go through the output to see if there is any warning/errors. Sometimes, I even spend few minutes trying to understand whether a certain line is just an information line or an error/warning. Any idea to make this task easier? Any rules for reading the output of pdflatex? Or may be some tools?

Answer 1

Try compiling with

pdflatex -file-line-error <filename>

That way, the .log file will generate C-style errors which begin with filename.tex:12:Error message, for an error on line 12; I think vim may even have built-in mechanisms for parsing these, or if not, making a regex for finding them in the log should not be hard.

As others have mentioned there are Vim plugins that have built in methods for dealing with LaTeX errors. Personally, the Vim-LaTeX (AKA the LaTeX suite) plugin annoys me. I think both AucTeX for vim and Vim LaTeX-box, but to each their own. They all have their own methods for dealing with errors.