Do not force me to manually abort LaTeX compilation when an error occurs

Question

As suggested here , latexmk is a convenient way to constantly compile your document every time you change the source. But often, when you work on a document, you will get errors, and then latex will panic and wait for user input before continuing. This can be very annoying, especially recently when I hacked something to compile latex directly from an etherpad document, which is saved continuously as you type.

Is there a parameter for latex or latexmk so that it just interrupts with an error message if it cannot compile? Or, if necessary, how do I configure some kind of Expect script to automatically dismiss LaTeX complaints?

(I thought pdflatex -halt-on-error option -halt-on-error do the trick, but apparently not.)

Bonus question: Skim on Mac OSX is a good PDF viewer that automatically recovers when a PDF changes (unlike Preview), except that whenever a latex error occurs, you confirm that you want to restore automatically. Texniscope does not have this problem, but I had to abandon Texniscope for other reasons . Is there a way to make Skim always autorefresh, or is there another viewer who gets this right?

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ADDED: a latexmk mini tutorial based on the answer to this question:

• Get latexmk here: http://www.phys.psu.edu/~collins/software/latexmk-jcc/

• Add the following to your ~/.latexmkrc file:

   $pdflatex = 'pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode'; 

  (for OS X with Skim)

   $pdf_previewer = "open -a /Applications/Skim.app"; 

• When editing the source file foo.tex run the following in the terminal:

   latexmk -pvc -pdf foo.tex 

• Use Skim or another live viewer to view foo.pdf. For Skim, just browse the “Sync” tab in the Skims settings and configure it for your editor.

Voila! Pressing save foo.tex now calls foo.pdf to update without touching a thing.

Answer 1

With MikTeX, pdflatex has this command line option:

  -interaction=MODE Set the interaction mode; MODE must be one of: batchmode, nonstopmode, scrollmode, errorstopmode. 

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Edit proposed by @ 9999 years:

These values ​​are equivalent to the set of LaTeX \commands , which provide the same functionality.

From Tips for Using TeX :

TeX operating modes behave as follows:

• errorstopmode dwells on all errors, regardless of whether they are related to errors in the source code or non-existent files.

• scrollmode does not stop at errors in the source, but requests input when a more serious error, for example, as a missing file.

• In a slightly incorrect name, nonstopmode TeX does not ask for input after serious errors, but it stops completely.

• batchmode prevents all output in addition to this (intended for use in automated scripts). In all cases, all errors are written to the log file (Yourtexfile.log).

Answer 2

You can also put \nonstopmode or \batchmode at the very beginning of your tex file; then it will work with any version of TeX, not just pdflatex . For more information about these and related teams see the Very Good Link to TeX (Raw) Teams by David Bausum . The team from the debugging family is especially interesting.

Answer 3

Another possible hack is simply:

 yes x | latexmk source.tex 

You can always create an alias for 'yes x | latexmk' if you intend to use this variant of the lots. The main advantage of this, which I can see above the other offers, is that it is very fast when you sometimes want latex to drive yourself like that.

Mehmet

Answer 4

The \batchmode command may also be executed.