A while back when I still worked on academic papers, I had a great workflow where I had a Makefile that knew how to build everything (deriving .eps files from x

A while back when I still worked on academic papers, I had a great workflow where I had a Makefile that knew how to build everything (deriving .eps files from xfig diagrams, deriving a main pdf file from all the .tex files etc), and I used inotifytools to notice when any of the build dependencies changed, and that triggered a run of `make`. xpdf has (... had?? apparently it got removed in the 4.0 series to get a release out the door) a "remote" option where you can send commands to a running xpdf instance, so I would have the above makefile notify the running xpdf to re-read the file. Put $EDITOR on one side and xpdf on the other, and you've got a near-realtime-updated view of what you're working on, just save the file and see the rebuilt pdf. It usually took around a second or two depending on the complexity of what I was working on. I didn't use emacs at the time, but if I had, I would try to integrate all of the above with flymake-mode to automatically build without me needing to save the file. (there are probably problems with this because if it builds while you're in the middle of typing a latex command, the latex process will fail to build)