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The vim-latex-live-preview Vim plugin and with :LLPStartPreview periodically refreshes the resultant PDF (by calling pdflatex on the tex file).

After a refresh the location displayed in the PDF is unchanged (as one would expect, perhaps?).

The PDF viewer I'm using is evince, though I'm happy to change. zathura looks interesting.

What I need: After making a change in the source through vim, at the next refresh the PDF viewer should jump to the latest change. Much like Tex Studio does.

The only way I can imagine this is possible is to tell the PDF viewer to jump to a specific line/page/section.

Q: Is there a Vim plugin which accomplishes this?

Q: Is there a PDF viewer which allows jumping to a specific location in a file after a reload?

John
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1 Answers1

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Can't tell how vim-latex's preview work, but setup forward and backward search in vim can be done with little configuration using zathura, based on this gist :

https://gist.github.com/vext01/16df5bd48019d451e078

Your insight is right. First, you ought to compile your pdf with synctex enabled (I imagine vim-latex does this automatically). Then, zathura has the --synctex-forward option that allows you to specify a location on the pdf to jump to. This is the "forward" direction. On the other side, there is -x command which tells zathura to execute command when you CTRL+Click. Finally vim can be launched with --servername nameserver so you can call it from outside (zathura's -x option) and jump to a specific location -- "backward" direction.

The gist gives a good implementation of this. Bellow is my slightly modified version :

Basically,

  • I always startup vim than <leader>p to open the pdf in the right place.
  • The vim alias automatically sets up a server, allowing external programs to talk to vim.
  • The mapping calls Synctex() which calls vimura external script, passing the --synctex-forward option and data from vim's context (line('.')...)
  • vimura calls zathura with both -x setup with vim and --synctex-forward retrieved from argument.
  • In the end, <leader>p moves the pdf to the right location, Ctrl+click moves vim to the right location.

Hope it makes it not too confusing.

perelo
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