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Tue 13 March 2012

LaTeX, vim and Fedora

Posted by ankur in Tech (531 words, approximately a 3 minute read)


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I'm a vim junkie (In spite of Sindre's numerous events to convert me into an Emacs person!). I'm also a LaTeX junkie. There are quite a few reasons behind my love for LaTeX:

  • Easy to use (Yes! Once you get the hang of it, it's very easy!)
  • Takes care of the dirty work: You need to work on the subject matter, it takes care of the formatting for you!
  • Free software license: http://www.latex-project.org/lppl/

There are numerous other reasons, such as easy bibliography management, for instance. You'll learn these advantages once you begin using LaTeX regularly. This post is not intended to convert anyone into a LaTeX user, rather, it's for folks who'd like to use LaTeX and vim on their Fedora systems. This post is Fedora specific. However, most of the tips should be valid on any operating system using LaTeX and vim.

System setup

  1. Install required packages

Set up Jindrich's texlive repository. (Thanks Jindrich!). The instructions for Fedora 15 and 16 can be found at this wiki page: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive

su -c 'yum install vim-enhanced vim-latex vim-X11 texlive texlive-bibtex-bin texlive-latex-bin-bin'

As the wiki mentions, you can install other required texlive components also. I'm working with a minimal setup here.

Vimrc setup

We need to make some additions to our ~/*.vimrc* file. The following lines work for me:

" Enable filetype plugins

filetype on

filetype plugin indent on

" latex stuff

let g:tex_flavor='latex'

" indentation for tex files

au FileType tex set sw=2

"Spell check

au FileType tex setlocal spell spelllang=en_gb

" Vim-latex rules:

" to enable ll to run automatically for pdfs

let g:Tex_DefaultTargetFormat='pdf'

let g:Tex_MultipleCompileFormats='dvi,pdf'

The comments tell you why these are needed, in brief. For complete explanations, you can... google up!

Getting down to writing LaTeX code and generating pdf files

Now that we have our system set up, lets write some LaTeX and use the tools we've installed.

Here's the presentation I had made for FUDCon Pune last year. You can pick up code snippets from there.

Some tips (limited to VIM on the terminal):

  • Command ":TTemplate" -> pick from  4 ready templates provided by vim-latex
  • ll -> In command mode, compile your file. vim-latex will run pdflatex multiple times along with bibtex as required.
  • lv -> In command mode, view the generated pdf file
  • : !bibtex %:rrun bibtex to make your bibliography. (%:r is the filename without the extension). This is not required with vim-latex
  • ]s -> next bad spelling
  • [s -> previous bad spelling
  • z= -> pop up list of spelling suggestions
  • SSE -> macro for new section
  • SSS -> macro for new subsection
  • SS2 -> macro for new subsubsection
  • Similar BibTeX shortcuts available for editing your bibliography.

These are just some of the many, many commands that make working on LaTex in VIM a breeze. For bibliography management, I currently use bibus. There are quite a few bibliography managers available in the fedora repositories. Try them out, use one that suits you.

More detailed documentation

A list of more detailed documentation:

I hope this makes LaTex writing easier for some of you!


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