pdfsync
I expect to be writing a lot in the coming months. To start, after having given the course once I noticed that I included a lot of new material during the talks (mainly concerning the component coalgebra and some extras on non-commutative differential forms and symplectic forms) so I\’d better update the Granada notes soon as they will also be the basis of the master course I\’ll start next week. Besides, I have to revise the Qurves and Quivers-paper and to start drafting the new bachelor courses for next academic year (a course on representation theory of finite groups, another on Riemann surfaces and an upgrade of the geometry-101 course).
So, I\’d better try to optimize my LaTeX-workflow and learn something about the pdfsync package. Here is what it is supposed to do :
pdfsync is an acronym for synchronization between a pdf file and the TeX or so source file used in the production process. As TeX system is not a WYSIWYG editor, you cannot modify the output directly, instead, you must edit a source file then run the production process. The pdfsync helps you finding what part of the output corresponds to what line of the source file, and conversely what line of the source file corresponds to a location of a given page in the ouput. This feature is achieved with the help of an auxiliary file: foo.pdfsync corresponding to a foo.pdf.
All you have to do is to put the pdfsync.sty file in the directory ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/pdfsync.sty and to include the pdfsync-package in the preamble of the LaTeX-document. Under my default iTex-front-end TeXShop it works well to go from a spot in the PDF-file to the corresponding place in the source-code, but in the other direction it only shows the appropriate page rather than indicate the precise place with a red dot as it does in the alternative front-end iTeXMac.
A major drawback for me is that pdfsync doesn\’t live in harmony with my favorite package for drawing commutative diagrams diagrams.sty. For example, the 75 pages of the current version of the Granada notes become blown-up to 96 pages because each commutative diagram explodes to nearly page size! So I will also have to translate everything to xymatrix&# 8230;