So I started writing a paper using Latex for the first time, and found it pretty difficult to get started with. So here a quick guide on how to get up and running with Latex on your local machine.
First, you need to install something that can work with Latex.
I'm on Arch Linux, so I just basically installed every texlive package listed
here. Then I downloaded a Latex template for
the journal I'm hoping to get my paper published in. I assume these are all similar.
You basically just want to edit the .tex file with Latex syntax. Then you run the command
pdflatex [myfile].tex, which produces a pdf file of the Latex output.
So obviously it's obviously really annoying to run this commnand everytime you want to see the Latex output, so I made a quick script to run this command anytime the .tex file is edited:
echo [myfile].tex | entr pdflatex [myfile].tex
You probably need to install the entr package for this. But now you can just open the output
pdf file with a pdf viewer (I use Evince), run
the script, and the pdf should update in whenever you save. There's an lot of other weird things
to iron out when using Latex, but I think this is the most annoying one.
