I've stumbled through a bunch of different IDE's and honestly I think that notepad++ is one of the most underrated options available to anyone doing TeX stuff.
Along that line, I think that most of these other options, which I started with, are overly complicated when we have tools like arara
and latexmk
. They all work fabulously well, and I greatly appreciate the help they have given me, but I think we should use all the tools available to us. I personally love arara
and I have my way that I now use every day that leans on arara
more than notepad++.
This is my notepad++ set up in NppExec
NPP_SAVEALL
cd $(CURRENT_DIRECTORY)
arara $(NAME_PART)
No batch files necessary. In my documents, I usually use a variation on this set of rules.
% arara: pdflatex: { synctex: on, shell: off }
% arara: biber
% arara: pdflatex: { synctex: on, shell: off }
% arara: pdflatex: { synctex: on, shell: off }
% arara: clean: { files: [ foo.log, foo.aux, foo.bbl, foo.blg, foo.log, foo.run.xml, foo-blx.bib, foo.bcf, foo.out ] }
% arara: sumatrapdf
The pdflatex
,biber
and clean
are all included in arara
. sumatrapdf
is mine, but is exceedingly simple. arara
also supplies a bibtex
rule which is just as simple to call, but I prefer biber.
sumatrapdf.yaml
!config
# SumatraPDF rule for arara
# Author: Mr Komandez
identifier: sumatrapdf
name: SumatraPDF
commands:
- <arara> DIRECTORY/sumatra.bat "@{getBasename(file)}.pdf" "@{options}"
arguments:
- identifier: options
flag: <arara> @{parameters.options}
sumatra.bat
START /b "C:\Progra~2\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe" %1 -reuse-instance %2
EXIT
This way, from the source code you can change your compilation options on the fly, but your actual compilation can stay key-bound the same way.