On a Mac, you can of course just open up a terminal, cd
to the directory where you keep the TeX file, and issue
while true; do sleep 5; latex -halt-on-error filename.tex; done
and have the DVI file open in a viewer that watches for (and reloads on) changes. The one-liner runs latex
continuously with 5 second break between runs (the -halt-on-error
options prevents the incantation from getting stuck if you saved a file with errors). You can also swap in pdflatex
instead.
This solves half of your problem. The other half has to be dealt with by your editor of choice. You need to set it up to automatically save the file every x seconds, and how to do that depends on the editor at hand.
Now, that one-liner I gave above is quite ugly and resource wasting, since it makes no sense to re-compile if no changes are made (Edit: See this comment below for a much better way to avoid this problem). So you can do something like
while true; do sleep 2; if [ filename.tex -nt filename.log ]; then latex -halt-on-error filename.tex; fi; done
which watches for changes to the TeX file (signaled by the fact that filename.tex
is more recently modified than filename.log
) and compile when necessary (with a possible two seconds delay).
Short of a WYSIWYG, I am not quite sure how you can achieve full real-time solution. Compiling the code takes usually a short amount of time (1 or 2 seconds, or more if the file is large). So if you are looking for a solution that calls the LaTeX compiler, it probably shouldn't try to do it more often than once every 5 or 10 seconds. So you won't be able to immediately see what you typed in the DVI window. Also, if the editor autosaves the file in a spot where you are halfway typing a command, then the source won't compile.
With LaTeX I feel that the better idea is "compile-on-saves", where the human initiates the saving of the file (as compared to "automatically saving and compiling in the background). For that, modern editors can generally support hot-keys where saving and compiling is mapped to one keystroke. In vim
I map F2 to compile and F4 to call XDVI.
Most serious text editors allow for multiple syntax highlighting themes. If you really need this, I'd suggest keeping one 'writing' theme with commands highlighted, and create a second 'review' them which is identical to the default except with all commands set to match the background or (perhaps a better idea) a few shades different, as Tobi suggested.
If reviewing in raw TeX is enough of an annoyance to you, you might consider switching to MultiMarkdown, a Markdown variant with LaTeX support. As you know, the philosophy behind Markdown is not just that it should be easy to write, but likewise easy to read.
Best Answer
TeXstudio (Sourceforge / tex.sx) doesn’t have autocorrect (built in, cf. Qrrbrbirlbel’s comment), but it marks unrecognized macros with a red background:
\foornote
vs.\footnote
In order for this to make sense, TeXstudio notices which packages you are using and automatically tries to determine which macros are defined by them, mostly sucessfully so (if it should fail, you could complement macros manually):
lipsum
loaded vs.lipsum
not loadedHowever, when you’re using TeXstudio (or just about any editor with decent autocompletion, you’re not going to need this too often because
\footnote
will be suggested to you as an autocomplete option:autocomplete suggestions for
\foo