[kwantam]

Very nice! It turns out that latexmk has this functionality:

    latexmk -pvc -pdf foo.tex

(It can be configured to HUP your pdf reader if needed, too.)

I usually add something like this command as the `auto` target in my latex Makefiles, which works pretty nicely.

[philsnow]

TIL about latexmk (which I gather is a perl script that handles a lot of the latex build deps, like running bibtex at the right time(s), for you automatically), thanks!

I never really understood most of the TeX world. I cargo-culted the bits I needed to make:

* articles for journal submissions (easy, they all provided packages or templates),

* my thesis (somebody had written a latex class that took care of all the school's formatting requirements a ~decade prior), and

* a resume,

and never dug into the differences between tex, latex, miktex, texlive, auctex, lyx, pdftex, xetex, luatex etc etc etc etc etc.

I was just to ask you if you knew of a 40000-foot overview of these kinds of things but stumbled across this article over at Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Articles/What%27s_in_a_... , it looks pretty apropos.