LaTeXDaemon

LaTeXDaemon speeds-up the latex compilation workflow by precompiling the preamble of your latex documents. It runs in the background, while using little cpu resource, and recompiles the document every time the .tex file or the preamble file are modified. It is smart enough to avoid recompilation if no real change was made to the file (i.e. you saved your LaTeX document but the content itself did not change). It has been tested with the Miktex distribution and people have reported that it works with other distributions as well.

The following screenshot should give you an idea of how LatexDaemon works:

Installation

Download the latest version latexdaemon.zip, unzip anywhere on your computer and then start latexdaemon.exe.

Bug report/feature request

You can report bug using the issue tracker.

Sources

Sources are hosted at GitHub.

Quick documentation

Command line arguments

When you start the daemon with no parameter you access a command prompt. You can get help on the commands that are available by typing 'h' at the prompt.

To get help on the other command line arguments type:

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latexdaemon.exe --help

To run the daemon using the pdflatex engine, use the following command line:

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latexdaemon.exe  --ini=pdflatex

Using LatexDaemon with Latex+dvips

If your your latex document produces Postscript outputs, for instance using the pstricks package, then you may want the daemon to automatically convert the .dvi output into .ps after the .dvi file has been generated. To achieve this you need to use the following options:

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latexdaemon.exe --ini=latex --afterjob=dvips

This tells the daemon to launch 'dvips' whenever the latex processing has successfully created the .dvi file. Now if you start Ghostview from the dameon prompt using the 'vs' command then the Ghostview page will be refreshed automatically when the .ps file is updated (without having to manually click on the Ghostview window).

Beamer package

Beamer is a very nice Latex package that provides a document class for generating slides. Since its source code is large it takes quite a while to compile a document which loads this package. This can easily gets annoying especially when you are working on your document and while editing you want to have a quick preview of the slides.

LatexDaemon solves this problem: the preamble being precompiled by LatexDaemon, the compilation of your slides becomes very fast! There is, however, a small incompatibility between the beamer package and the precompilation mode of LatexDaemon (at least under the Miktex 2.5 distribution) that needs to be fixed in order to make things work:

If you are producing your document with latex + dvips then you need to perform the following modification in the file pgfsys-dvips.def from the package pgf (used by beamer) located in 'C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.5\tex\generic\pgf\systemlayer'. Line number 18 of this file containing

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\def\pgf@@sys@@postscript@@object#1{\special{! #1}}

should be replaced by the following lines:

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2: 
3: 
4: 
5: 

\ifx\textsuperscript\@@undefined
    \def\pgf@@sys@@postscript@@object#1{\special{! #1}}
\else
    \def\pgf@@sys@@postscript@@object#1{\AtBeginDvi{\special{! #1}}}
\fi

If you are using pdflatex instead of latex then the pdflatex compilation will fail (due a problem with beamer/pgf). Unfortunately I do not know yet how to fix the problem.

Changelog

The list of changes can be viewed at: the changelog