previewing LaTeX output on OS X

I write almost everything in LaTeX. In Windows I generally previewed the output as Postscript using Ghostview, but OS X is much more PDF-oriented. I’ve found this terrific little PDF viewer called Skim, which I like more than anything else for LaTeX output. The key reason is that it will automatically reload the PDF file any time it changes on disc. That means you can work with just two or three windows — the text editor, Skim, and maybe a terminal window — and always have a pretty up-to-date view of your document.

Better yet, you can automatically switch focus from a terminal window to Skim with Applescript:

osascript -e ‘tell application “Skim” to activate’

This means you can construct a shell script that automatically compiles your LaTeX document into PDF and then shifts into Skim so that you’re looking at a freshly updated version.   Pretty sweet!  The only thing left is to figure out how to bind this set of commands correctly into Emacs…

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