Here&#39;s a script I hacked together last night.<br><br>If you&#39;re writing something with lots of complicated diagrams (like my thesis, to pick an example at random) then you often have to go through several compile-view-edit cycles before any particular diagram looks right. This involves a lot of tedious waiting. The obvious way to speed it up is to try and reduce the time between making an edit and seeing the results.
<br><br>Hence this script. The idea is that you can &#39;watch&#39; a LaTeX document, so that whenever you save a change the&nbsp; display is updated as quickly as possible to reflect the change.<br><br>The script is currently somewhat inflexible in its assumptions. It compiles .tex -&gt; .dvi -&gt; ps, and uses gv as the PostScript viewer. If other people are interested, I can certainly make it more configurable. That&#39;s why I&#39;m posting it here.
<br><br>The reason for the aparently-perverse choice of gv as the viewer is that ps2pdf is really, really slow, so if you want a fast cycle – and you&#39;re using PostScript specials – you need to view the DVI or PS directly. I don&#39;t know a DVI previewer that works with the PostScript specials I use, so that leaves PS. I don&#39;t know of anything else for the mac that can display PS as quickly as gv (I&#39;d love to be enlightened here), and gv is very pleasant to use once you get used to its idiosyncratic interface.
<br><br>Anyway, that means you&#39;ll need to have X11.app and gv installed for it to work. As I say, this can potentially be changed, but that&#39;s the current situation. You also need to have gv in your $PATH.<br><br>Apart from avoiding PS-&gt;PDF conversion, the main trick I use to speed up the update cycle is to build a custom TeX format file for the document. The preamble – 
i.e. anything before \begin{document} – is compiled into a special format when the file is watched. Thereafter, when the file is updated, the preamble is merely inspected to see whether it has changed. If it hasn&#39;t, the previously-generated format is used. Assuming you don&#39;t change the preamble very often, this is a big win if you load a lot of large packages. It halves the compile time of the document I&#39;m currently working on.
<br><br>Attached are two files:<br><br>Watch document.tmcommand<br>&nbsp; A TextMate command that invokes the watcher. Copy this into your favourite bundle. (If you try to watch a file that&#39;s already being watched, you&#39;re given the option to stop watching it. Alternatively you can just close gv, and it will stop watching. Note that quitting TextMate will *not* stop the watcher.)
<br><br>latex_watch.pl<br>&nbsp; A Perl script that does the real work. This should be placed in the directory Support/bin inside the same bundle that you copied the command into. (You probably need to create that directory.)<br>
<br>If something doesn&#39;t work, you _should_ get a nice error dialog telling you what went wrong.<br><br>I&#39;d really appreciate any feedback. I think that, with some more flexibility, something like this could be useful to a lot of people.
<br><br>Robin<br>