I have been doing a bit of PDF creation with LaTeX (I think that is how it is capitalized) lately. It is really powerful and I definitely prefer it to creating similar documents in Word. You have more control and it usually ends up looking better.
Anyway, an issue that I have been running into is that I like to compile a tex document after a few changes to see how it looks. I do the whole ‘pdflatex awesomeness.tex’ command and sure enough I have a few errors/warnings that I am not too concerned about at this point. The CLI (command line interface) for pdflatex likes to tell you about each one and even forces you to acknowledge each one by hitting enter. This is all fine and dandy when you have 1 or 2 errors, but for a larger document that has many minor errors, this can get annoying. I know what you are thinking, “Why don’t you just clean up your document?!” For the same reason that I don’t do the dishes until I am no longer able to get at the faucet in the kitchen sink. These little errors are more or less trivial and I plan to clean them all up later. Furthermore, many of them will clean themselves up once I add in some sort of closing tag that is missing. So what is the solution?
Well, right when the CLI gives you that first error message, type the letter ‘q’, hit enter, and savor the 5 seconds that you saved from having to suffer through all those warning messages. It’s as simple as that.
For that and other useful commands, check out this page from the LaTeX wikibook.
Josh Branchaud 