r/LaTeX • • 11h ago

Discussion What do you use to write LaTeX?

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124 Upvotes

Hi all. Recently, I created a LaTeX editor based on the Jetbrains platform, called LaTeX Pro. I also created an RST, AsciiDoc, Typst and MarkDown editor, and when one of my users switched from Typst to LaTeX, I got a bit frustrated with the way how the LaTeX works, and LaTeX Pro is the result.

However, I'm curious to hear what other people are using? Is Overleaf the goto solution, or do people prefer a more local solution? I'm curious to hear what features people really appreciate, so perhaps I can draw some inspiration from that. Thanks!

Update Okay, okay, this blew up quickly!!! Thanks for all the responses, you've given me already quite some tools to look into! Much appreciated to all who left a comment here!!!

Update 2: Thanks for all the responses! I went through the comments and put together a quick summary of the most frequently mentioned LaTeX editors.

Editor Mentions
VS Code (+ LaTeX Workshop) 16
Overleaf 16
Vim / Neovim 12
TeXstudio 11
Emacs / AUCTeX 5
TeXworks 5
TeXmaker 4
TeXShop 3

These are approximate counts, and some people mentioned multiple editors. This isn't a scientific survey, just a snapshot of this discussion.


r/LaTeX • • 18h ago

Bringing native unicode math into the engine level (hobby engine update)

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18 Upvotes

Another brief update for my hobby TeX engine series -- I'm about to have a period in which I have less time to work on this project for a spell, and wanted to get in one last update. This time: just like XeTeX and LuaTeX made working natively with OpenType fonts part of the engine level, I'm exploring what it would mean to do the same thing for OpenType math fonts.

In part because I had less time to plan this video out, I feel like my explanation of exactly what I'm doing at the engine level was shaggier than it should have been. To be clearer: XeTeX and LuaTeX already handle low-level OpenType Math table box-building, and expose primitives to teach the engine about unicode characters. However, they leave the heavy lifting of setting everything up to the unicode-math package (instantiating separate font families for text, script, and scriptscript sizes, assigning thousands of codepoints to map standard symbols and Greek letters, dealing with all of Unicode's historical exception tables (looking at you, Planck's constant!) and so on).

In NemaTeX, I've shifted all of that font-orchestration and alphabet-mapping machinery into the c++ code. When an OpenType math font is active, the engine can do things like treating \mathbf, \mathcal, or \mathbb as virtual math alphabets, translating the base characters directly to their target unicode codepoints.

To be honest, I know that for compatibility I will have to revisit some of the specific design decisions I made there. I somehow didn't know this before I was working on this part of my engine, but it turns out that the unicode-math package has a two-tiered semantic system: "symbols" (\symbf, \symit, etc) refer to glyphs in the OpenType math font, and "math" (\mathbf, etc) refer to glyphs in the corresponding text font files.

The way I implemented it for now probably is just a reflection of my old-fashioned mental model of LaTeX, in which by "\mathbf" I meant "\symbf" without knowing that that was the spelling. But that being said, I'm curious how other people think about the semantics here: should \mathbf pull from the math font or the text font?


r/LaTeX • • 23h ago

Unanswered How do I upload a LaTeX paper as a ZIP file to a Springer Nature journal?

0 Upvotes

Hi everyone!

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I'm a bit confused about how to submit my paper.

I wrote my paper using Overleaf and used the Springer Nature template because I want to submit it to one of their journals. The journal's submission website says I need to upload a ZIP file containing the LaTeX source files. It gives the following instructions:

"LaTeX documents with figures and tables compressed into a .zip format. We will compile these into a PDF for peer review."

I'm using a Mac, and when I click Download ZIP on Overleaf, I seem to get a folder containing my .tex file and other project files. However, the journal's submission website doesn't let me upload a .tex file directly. It accepts PDFs, other document formats, and ZIP files.

My questions are:

  • Am I supposed to compress the downloaded folder into a ZIP file myself?
  • Should the ZIP file contain the entire Overleaf project, including the .tex file, bibliography, figures, and any other necessary files?
  • Is there anything specific I need to do to make sure Springer Nature can compile the files correctly?

I'd really appreciate a step-by-step explanation or a tutorial, especially for macOS and Overleaf, as this is my first time submitting a LaTeX paper to a journal.

Thanks so much for your help!


r/LaTeX • • 1h ago

Discussion One more free local editor Autocompile support, but not collaboration

• Upvotes

Countless "AI slop" editors have flooded the market, and to some, this app might look like just another one of them. For many of you who are feeling fatigued by this trend, I understand it can certainly feel that way. However, it would be a real shame if a program I put so much thought into disappeared without even being tried out.

I truly hope it can be of great help to you. In order to distribute it for free, I had to remove features that continuously consume server resources (such as coworking/collaboration). These features may be included later if I actually launch a paid version in the future.

For now, I am releasing the Windows version first. Please note that you must install the full version of TeX Live beforehand. Mac and Linux (Ubuntu/Debian-based) versions will also be released soon. I was planning to release it simultaneously on GitHub, but due to an issue with my GitHub account, the GitHub release has been temporarily delayed.

You don't have to login, You don't need to do anything but install Texlive full packages and LaTeXian.

General Editor is basic Editor. Tabular Editor and Math editor are additional editors. it would be more helpful for beginners

https://www.latexian.com/en

https://www.latexian.com/

"Any comments or advice would be greatly appreciated."