Sublime Forum

Skim alternatives

#1

I have been enjoying Sublime quite a bit, but the default viewer, Skim, for LaTeX compilation has been incredibly unstable recently, to the point of crashing literally every other build. I don’t fault Sublime for this obviously. Searching on these errors yields information that it is a basic core apple library that is the fault and that there is no repair in sight for this viewer on Mac.

There is also not a great amount of documentation on setting up alternative viewers. Following the README’s instructions fails to produce results. In fact, it seems I can only get sublime to work with preview if I uninstall skim. A stackexchange post suggests to edit viewPDF.py – which doesn’t exist on my install. This level of tight integration is not user friendly. I shouldn’t have to dig into the *.py files and update the code base to do something as simple as changing a viewer.

Has anyone else experienced this level of issue with Skim and LaTeX or have alternative viewer recommendations?

Best,
Lance

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#2

The stackexchange post may be outdated. The viewers are not tight integrated into LaTeXTools and there is a section about alternative viewers. As far I know the only supported alternative viewer is Preview.app, which lacks of basic features like forward and inverse search. There is an open issue for evince #1001 and everyone can add their own viewer implementations.

ping @ig0774

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#3

My first suggestion would be to try completely deleting Skim including the folder in ~/Library/Application Support and the preference file in ~/Library/Preferences, then redone loading the latest version and trying from there. I personally don’t experience any issues using Skim, but obviously there may be differences between my setup and yours.

If you can do without the forward and inverse sync features, Preview.app and the preview viewer should work fine. Details on how to set that up are in the Alternative Viewer section of the README @r-stein linked to above.

Alternatively, you may have some luck using Okular or you could try looking through the various comments on #1001.

The fact is that apart from Skim, there is no really well-supported viewer, because it is the only application I know of that supports forward and inverse sync.

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