I'm a command-line junkie and often compile with a simple pdflatex filename.tex
from a terminal, and I forget (or am too lazy) to type -interaction=nonstopmode
or interaction=batchmode
. Hence, when I encounter errors, I've given the interactive prompt, which I find confusing and unintuitive, and usually get out of it as quick as possible with 'q'.
Does anyone make use of the interactive prompts, and find them useful or advantageous as opposed to simply parsing the .log file, fixing the problem and recompiling from the beginning? Is it worth learning the interactive system?
If I had to guess, I'd suppose the interactive mode hasn't changed much since the early days of TeX, when it took much longer to compile a document, and you might not want to start from scratch when you made one tiny mistake. But now that compilation takes seconds at most, is there a compelling reason ever to use interactive mode?
I ask partly because I'm on the verge of putting alias pdflatex='pdflatex -interaction=batchmode'
in my .bashrc
, but I wonder whether anyone thinks I'd be losing anything by doing so. If so, is there any free documentation out there about how to use the interactive system? (Or am I overthinking/overcomplicating it?)
x
, notq
) is useful, because it potentially saves the time it takes the rest of the document to compile (or fail). It is also useful for debugging with\show
.pdflatex -interaction=batchmode foo
is often faster thanpdflatex foo
," source