| name | latex |
| description | Create, edit, compile, or troubleshoot LaTeX documents and generated PDFs in IDEA, including reports, manuscripts, Beamer slides, equations, tables, figures, citations, and .tex-to-PDF workflows. |
LaTeX
Use this skill when working with .tex source, LaTeX errors, or PDF outputs generated from LaTeX.
Environment
IDEA includes pdflatex, latexmk, TeX Live LaTeX packages, bibliography tooling, ghostscript, poppler-utils, and chktex. Do not use pip install pdflatex as a substitute for the system LaTeX toolchain.
Workflow
- Save generated
.tex, assets, logs, and PDFs under IDEA's standard output directory: /app/static/{user_id}/{session_id}.
- Prefer
latexmk -pdf -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error for compilation.
- If using
pdflatex, run it at least twice when the document has references, citations, a table of contents, or cross-references.
- Verify the final PDF exists and has nonzero size before returning a link.
- On failure, inspect the
.log file and fix the first meaningful LaTeX error before retrying.
Defaults
For reports, default to article with common packages such as geometry, amsmath, amssymb, graphicx, booktabs, xcolor, hyperref, and enumitem. Use conservative formatting unless the user asks for a specific style.
