How do FreeBSD users LaTeX?

A

Allamgir

I'm considering leaving Arch Linux for FreeBSD once 8 comes out, but I need a good LaTeX setup. How do the other TeX-ies around here do it? I really shy away from many GUI solutions like Kile or Texmaker. The CLI is where it's at. However, if there's some super awesome GUI solution, I'll check it out as long as it works in a tiling wm (I like XMonad).

Some things I would really like:
-Powerful syntax highlighting
-Easy compilation to PDF and side by side preview (not necessarily live, but I would like it to update whenever I compile)
-Time savers like autocompletion to end environments, placeholders, macros, etc.
-Look nice. If the GUI looks toally out of place on my system, I'll be hesitant to use it. I like the CLI because text is so consistent.
-I'll post more if I think of any.

Vim? Vim-latexsuite? Emacs and AUCTeX? Gedit with a plugin? What is the best LaTeX solution around here?
 
Thanks for the replies!

Well, on Arch I haven't had a complete setup in a while (since I've been OS hopping for a while and FreeBSD has just piqued my interest). I've tried emacs + AUCTeX, but I found it complicated to set up — it's complicated to learn, but I don't mind that so much. At one point I just edited the tex source with vim and compiled separately, although I found it a slight hassle to type everything longhand and then open a new terminal to compile, then constantly update my PDF viewer by reopening the file.* Vim-latexsuite sounds interesting, but I couldn't find it in ports. Is it there/available somewhere else?




*What's a PDF viewer that updates automatically upon changes to the file?
 
I use the AUCTeX plugin for vim and xpdf for viewing. Just press R to refresh after compiling a new file. No need to close and re-open.
 
There's AUCTeX for vim? I definitely need to look this up! This is what you're talking about, right? It doesn't seem to have been updated in a while, so either that means it's dead or it's pretty much perfect (I'm hoping for the latter, since I haven't found vim-latex for FreeBSD in a way I can easily keep up to date). And I didn't know xpdf had that feature!
 
Also in vim, you can just type :!latex source.tex to compile, later on it's just :! and the Up arrow which will recall the latex command from history. Or you can write a Makefile and use the :make command. :e

As for completion, there are completion plugins for vim, although I'm not a big fan of them. You may want to look for some, though.
 
Yes, Allamgir, that's the one. It may not be perfect, but most everything you would want is there and it's easy to modify.
 
Hey oxyd, I found this trick that when entering an external command in vim,
% means the file name. So I can just run :!pdflatex %

just thought you might like to know that :)
 
@Allamgir

I usually add print/tetex and print/makeindex pacakges and type whole document with plain vi/vim.

I also used geany in the past.

-Powerful syntax highlighting
Click to expand...
Works with both vi/vim and geany.

-Easy compilation to PDF and side by side preview (not necessarily live, but I would like it to update whenever I compile)
Click to expand...
Code:
I use pdflatex for that which is part of tetex port.

I also launch the new PDF every time I generate it, like that:

Code: 
#! /bin/sh

READER=evince
TARGET=document
LATEX="pdflatex -halt-on-error"

  [ $? -eq 0 ] && ${LATEX}  ${TARGET}
  [ $? -eq 0 ] && bibtex    ${TARGET} &
  [ $? -eq 0 ] && makeindex ${TARGET}.idx &
  [ $? -eq 0 ] && ${LATEX}  ${TARGET} | tail
  [ $? -eq 0 ] && ${LATEX}  ${TARGET} | tail
  [ $? -eq 0 ] && ${READER} ${TARGET}.pdf &

I use it with simple Makefile, so everytime I want to create new PDF, I just type make, same for cleaning, a script for cleaning all generated stuff is cleared with make clean.

-Time savers like autocompletion to end environments, placeholders, macros, etc.
Click to expand...
If I remember geany autocompletes stuff, but vi/vim do not, at least not stock vim.

Also, about macros you mentioned, I just use my functions in LaTeX, for code listings, for putting images and so ...
 
I use Vim to do the editing, although I occasionally open up Texmaker. It's possible to set a key combination for building the PDF files in Vim.
 
Lyx, while nice for a beginner, makes LaTeX that is hard to maintain. If you are working alone, it may work very well, but when several people are working on a doc and some of them work directly with the TeX doc, as experienced LaTeXers generally do, they will not be happy.
 
Allamgir said:
I'm considering leaving Arch Linux for FreeBSD once 8 comes out, but I need a good LaTeX setup. How do the other TeX-ies around here do it?
Click to expand...
We don't. We are waiting Hiroki Sato to port TeXLive to FreeBSD from 2001 or something like that. In the mean time if you really need to use TeX with BSD you have two options. One is two switch to OpenBSD or more recently to NetBSD. The other one is to use unofficial port of Romain Tartière which is not allowed to ports three because we do not want to hurt Mr. Sato's feelings.
 
Allamgir said:
What's wrong with teTeX? Slackware uses that too.
Click to expand...
It is dead since 2005! TeXLive is only official distribution of TeX and friends for *nix. If you were serious TeX user you would know why teTeX is useless for advanced work.
 
Normally I just write some essays and reports, etc. occasionally with some mathematics and Greek letters. I use the default font or Latin modern, and I set the margins with the geometry package. As long as tetex can handle that and maybe some more, I'm OK.

But how have we not yet ported texlive? I would think the FreeBSD community could do it within 4 years!
 
It looks like vermaden has plenty of graphics, non-English characters (which I normally don't need, but I hate when WYSIWYG or some other document/word processors have strange boxes and alignment issues with them), a well-organized table of contents and index, etc. I didn't really see any mathematics, but I would assume they work fine since the original TeX was designed to typeset math well way back in the 20th century ;)

So far what I'm planning to do now is use vim to edit .tex files by hand, maybe without any macros or helpers (if it really is a pain then I'll look at auctex.vim or something else), and use normal CLI commands to do my compiling. I'll view with xpdf since it has that awesome R for refresh feature.
 
For me it's vim and Texlive (I installed it manually). I also prefer to use xelatex because of its excellent support for OpenType fonts.
 
vermaden said:
But maybe I do not use some real advanced features
Click to expand...

It is hard to say if you use advanced features or not. To me it looks like you have long document with some images included, where the images were taken from other sources
Code: 
\includegraphics[file.eps]

More complicated stuff would include drawing the images directly in LaTeX, tikz for example: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/timing-diagram.

Basically anything where MS Office (or OpenOffice.org) would suffice is simply in my mind. TOC, well organized bibliography, etc etc are the basis on which LaTeX is built.
 
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