Sumatra PDF

I used latex in linux for ages under my favourite editor, KILE. Everything worked out of the box with my default pdf viewers. I could recompile, the pdf would update and be shown directly in my currently-open viewer without having to renavigate. I could do both inverse and forward searches, everything was fine.

Now, I am, for various reasons, restricted to a windows environment for a few months. This is all fine and dandy except when I work in latex. Despite not being the happiest with texniccenter, it works. The problem I have is that, every time I want to fine-tune a file, I have to close the PDF that is open, recompile, reopen the PDF, re-navigate to the location of interest. Repeat. Make it a thesis, and your navigation problems become worse!

After some searching, I found a window solution! (hurray!)

  • Drop acrobat and use SummatraPDF, an open-source, very-light-weight, non-registry-using, SINGLE-FILE pdf viewer. wow. Just in case you love acrobat, it actually has a menu item to "open file in acrobat". nice of them. I ran the Installer Version
  • Configure texniccenter to use SummatraPDF in all the variations. I found A great website that explains this! Just in case it dies, I will copy the main points here.
    • Tell your latex compiler to generate sync info. On Texlive 2008, which I use, you can just include a package: \usepackage{pdfsync} it will generate the needed metafiles.

Here I copy paste from the above site, edited for my setup and for what i see as typos, and I added some comments.

Inverse search

Inverse search command:

If you are using the official build of SumatraPDF this setting can be set once for all at the command-line (cmd) with:

"C:\Program Files\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe" -inverse-search "\"C:\Program Files\TeXnicCenter\TEXCNTR.EXE\" /ddecmd \"[goto('%f', '%l')]\""

Forward search

To setup forward-search with TeXnicCenter proceed as follows:

  1. - Menu 'Build\Define output profiles...'
  2. - Select the profile "Latex=>PDF"
  3. - Select the tab 'Viewer'
  4. - Fill the options as follows:

View project's output: select DDE command
Command: [Open("%bm.pdf",0,1,1)]
Server: SUMATRA
Topic: control
Path of executable: c:\tools\SumatraPDF-sync.exe -reuse-instance
Forward search: select DDE command
Command: [ForwardSearch("%bm.pdf","%Wc",%l,0,0,0)]
Server: SUMATRA
Topic: control

Close document before running (La)TeX: Do not close]

good luck!!