Being able to go from a line in WinEdt to the corresponding place in a compiled document is extremely useful and saves a lot of time. This has long been possible using Yap with dvi documents, but Yap is slow and ugly and the dvi files usually have to be converted to pdf before sending them to anyone else.

So I tend to use pdftexify to create pdf files directly, but I miss having synchronization between what I write and the pdf file that is created.

However, I’ve found a solution that is not too difficult to implement and seems to work well. It replaces the Adobe pdf reader with SumatraPDF.  There is some fiddling of settings in WinEdt as explained in the instructions below. The information below is adapted from William Blum’s website.

  1. Download SumatraPDF and install it to the (default) directory c:\Program files\SumatraPDF
  2. For Winedt 6.0
    Run WinEdt and go to Options/Execution Modes. Click on the “PDF Viewer” tab and click the “Sumatra PDF” button. Make sure the box under “Sync Tex” is ticked. Then click “OK”. That’s it!
  3. For Winedt 5.6.
    1. Download Acrobat OpenDoc.edt and Sumatra-Find.edt and save them to C:\Program Files\WinEdt Team\WinEdt\Exec
    2. Run WinEdt and go to Options/Execution Modes. Click on the “Acrobat” tab and replace the path to the “PDF Viewer Executable” with"C:\Program files\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe" -reuse-instance. Like this:
    3. Before closing the dialog box, go to the “Console Applications” tab and select “PDFTexify”. Change the switches field to--pdf --tex-option=--synctex=-1Similarly, for PDFLaTeX and PDFTeX, change the switches fields to--synctex=-1Then click “OK”.
    4. In WinEdt, go to the menu ‘Option/Menu setup’. Create a new macro menu somewhere (under ‘Accessories’ for instance) and fill the options as follows:
        Name: Sumatra FindMacro: Exe('%b\Exec\Sumatra-Find.edt');

        Requires File Filter: %P\%N.pdf

        Start in: %P

        Shortcut: Shift-F8

      Now when editing a .tex file in WinEdt, you can go to the corresponding line in the pdf document by pressing Shift-F8.

Update
  • The above instructions only work with MikTeX (tested on MikTeX 2.7 and 2.8). If you use TeXLive, or some other LaTeX implementation, then you will need to figure it out for yourself.
  • You should not use the pdfsync package.
  • Some people have reported trouble with beamer. I have had no difficulties using beamer with the above settings.
  • The above instructions have now been updated (8 Sep 2009) to take account of all comments below.
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