Spacemacs Latex: how to make view command tile vertically with emacs window?

Question

I'm using Spacemacs Latex layer, which uses Auctex. If press space m v for the first time, the document viewer opens up in full screen over my emacs window. After, it only updates the window and keeps it under my emacs window. So to have the workflow that I want, I have to manually resize the emacs window to take up the left half of my screen and the Document Viewer window take up the right half.

There are two possible solutions that I can think of, I don't know how to do either or which is easier:

Get a pdf viewer for emacs and make the view command open the pdf in emacs in a new split window.

Make the view command somehow resize the Document Viewer window and my emacs window.

But presumably there is a standard solution to this problem? It's a pretty standard workflow so I expect someone to have figured it out.

Answer 1

This answer is a little bit delayed, but I stumbled over a similar problem. One solution could be to use the package pdf-tools. Installing this on macOS (if you are using this OS) can be quite challenging. I went this path and following this answer was fruitful. Additionally, the following lines in the .emacs or init.el file are potentially needed to convince emacs to open the pdf with pdf-tools

;; Use pdf-tools to open PDF files
(setq TeX-view-program-selection '((output-pdf "PDF Tools"))
      TeX-source-correlate-start-server t)

;; Update PDF buffers after successful LaTeX runs
(add-hook 'TeX-after-compilation-finished-functions
           #'TeX-revert-document-buffer)

I just didn't figure out how to convince emacs to split the window vertically (instead of horizontally), when I run C-c C-a to compile and view the pdf.