Writing PDF With Atom and Skim
Intro
When huge amount of books and articles I read, I believe the best way to remember them is by note-taking. It’s for summarizing things I learn, and for future reference. It’s also the reason I created this blog. As a mathematics major, I dealt with math equations a lot. After dealt with org-mode and markdown. I feel like I shall give Latex a go. Here’s how I configure Latex note-taking environment with my MacBook.
MacTex
Since I use MacBook as my primary computer. MacTex is everything I need to compile a tex file. And it’s pretty large, 3.0G. You can also download the basic version which is only around 72M. But I don’t suggest you do that. Since the full version include some necessary software like Tex Live Utility which help you manage and update plugins. And you can also use included TexShop for writing latex files. For windows users, you can download MiKTex.
Atom
There’s are two plugins you need for Atom. First one is latex. The second one is language-latex. The first one provide us the way to compile latex files. The second one provide the syntax highlight.
Skim
Install Skim. It’s one of the best pdf reader on Mac OS. After you installed skim, go to Preference and then Sync tab. Choose Atom in PDF-Tex Sync support then you are all set. You can set up skim with other text editor from TeX_and_PDF_Synchronization.
By setting up this pdfsync, you can jump back and forth between pdf file you created and the latex file you are writing. After you built/compile your latex file by Ctrl+Alt+B. Or you can use Command+Shift+P to open command palette. From there you can just type in build to build the latex file. And the pdf file it generates, will be opened in Skim after the build is finished. From pdf file you created, you can press Command+Shift and click anywhere you want to edit. It will take you back to the exact line of the source code in latex.
Github
When dealing with .tex files, it generates a lot of files that we do not want to upload to Github. So this is the .gitignore file, I’m been using. Or you can simply excluding .aux, .log files (there are tons of them) one by one.
# Ignore everything
*
# Except tex files
!.gitignore
!*.tex
!*.bib
!*.pdf
# Ignore subdirectories
!*/