

WhizzyTeX - Real-time LaTeX previewing for Emacs - rcfox
http://cristal.inria.fr/whizzytex/

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jonshea
WhizzyTeX is _amazing_. It probably triples my productivity for LaTeX when the
material is math intensive. If you’re typesetting matrixes or tables, or
anything else where you have to align things, then WhizzyTeX is even better
still.

In graduate school I could take math notes in real time as long as the lecture
was fairly well structured and there weren’t too many diagrams. I think my
System ID and Control notes turned out even better than the textbook.

Unfortunately, while I didn’t have any trouble running WhizzyTeX on Ubuntu, I
never got it working well on OS X. I think I (maybe) got it to go using xpdf
in X11, but it’d be much nicer if you could run Skim or Preview as viewer
instead. If there’s ever a time when I need to do a lot of LaTeX again then
I’ll definitely look into writing a patch.

I still dream that one day I’ll have something like WhizzyTeX for building
websites. Imagine if you could edit your source files in your favorite editor
and have the rendered webpage update with every keystroke. It’s the best of
both WYSIWYG and plain source editing. You could definitely make something
work if you were editing plain html, but if you’re using a framework (and who
isn’t?) then it starts to seem a lot more complicated.

~~~
rcfox
It's especially great for the tipa (IPA symbols) and synttree (Syntax trees)
packages, as they can get to be pretty finicky.

For diagrams, WhizzyTeX and TikZ is even more amazing! (Although, it doesn't
seem to do node text properly. Still, it's the layout of the diagram that's
most important.)

