I have been looking at ways to edit LaTeX files on the iPad. There are already interesting LateX editors, but I find them quite heavy to use yet, and LateX files are not very nice to decode on the small screen.

Markdown is a much simpler and readable tagging language invented by John Gruber (aka Daring Fireball). I have been tempted to play with it several times in the past, without really getting there. My preferred Latex editor is Lyx now, but we are really not ready to get an iPad version of this lovely editor. So Markdown has seemed an interesting possibility to explore for writing Latex in a nice editor as iAWriter. Since MultimarkDown offers quite efficient translation of Markdown to Latex (including the equations and figures), as week as other formats like HTML and OPML (useful for importing in Freemind).

Here is my automatic setup for this workflow:

1. synchronizing iAWriter documents between the iPad and my laptop sung iCloud;
2. copying the file from the iAWriter’s iCloud folder to a Dropbox folder each time it has been updated (with [Hazel]);
3. converting the .md file in the Dropbox folder to Latex, HTML, and OPML using Multimarkdown in Hazel, as soon as a new version is copied there;
4. Convert the Latex to pdf by running pdflatex+bibtex+pdflatex twice).

For the third step, I had to adapt the Multimarkdown latex support files to create a standard article export, instead of the memoir one used by default.

Now I can edit my documents on the iPad or on the MacBook using iAWriter and they get automatically synched and converted. If my MacBook is on, I can even get back the compiled PDF back on the iPad, using a Dropbox access (through GoodReader, for example).

Another post gives more details on this process and on how I configured Hazel