Comment by kkfx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kkfx | Hacker News Reader

I honestly do not care about instant preview... On one side I prefer to focus on my writing in text, witch means my LaTeX sources are well formatted for human readability and well spread as needed for the same reason when (rarely for me) I write not so short stuff, I have my collection of templates for almost anything and anything I need something different I collect the LaTeX structure a bit, even if trivial, in an org-mode note, to have ready made stuff as needed.

On the "final" step looking for produced pdf issues I have to recompile sometimes, mostly on tables/TiKz stuff, but the little build time does not disturb me... The only a bit annoying part is the "like-a-lisp" default interaction mode in case of error finding it essentially useless since I have to correct the sources anyway.

For writing, it's great not to have the distraction.

But for publishing (especially book/e-book publishing, which always requires a lot of fiddling to get perfect!), it's really, really useful. My current workflow is TeXStudio with a lot of F5ing, which works pretty well...but that final run-through would be so much faster if I could see changes as they're made.

I'm a bit confused by this and the posts above. In vscode it is possible to configure it such that on every save a new pdf is generated. You can open the PDF to the right and it's essentially instant preview.

I've used this config when writing papers, etc, and it works flawlessly.

As for diffs (what has changed), it is also possible to color code the changes too.

I can't recall how I configured viscose, but it was a fairly standard approach.

I use vscode and that is my experience. Instant preview is cool, but at least for me it isn't even something I think about.

It may be that some of us didn’t know there was an extension that did this in vscode! ;) I definitely wasn’t aware of it until your comment.

Are you using LaTeX-Workshop?

yes I agree, however as a student working with LaTeX for the first time, instant preview is awesome, it allows me to instantly see what my changes do to the preview, and greatly increases productivity when I'm not sure what I am doing and constantly checking the output for what it did.

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