Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Compositor: WYSIWYG LaTeX for Mac

Karl Traunmüller (tweet) introduces Compositor:

In a traditional LaTeX workflow, you would edit the LaTeX source in a text editor, compile the document every now and then, and check the effects of your changes in the DVI viewer.

In Compositor, the DVI viewer is the document editor — you type directly in the rendered document, and every keystroke is immediately reflected. The source editing and compilation steps are completely eliminated from the workflow.

[…]

Pressing Ctrl+S will open an inline source editor showing the LaTeX source behind the document region you’re currently working on (often this will be the current paragraph).

The video demo is very impressive.

Update (2017-07-10): Howard Oakley:

One major milestone accomplished on ‘classic’ Macs was Barry Smith and Gordon Lee’s unique real-time rendering in Textures. Tragically, the arrival of Mac OS X and the deaths of both developers left their work orphaned. Since then, TeX systems have generally adopted a two-window model, in which text content is marked up in one, and rendered very briskly in the other. But the dream of actually being able to work directly in the rendered version has never quite been realised.

See also: my old review of Textures.

Update (2018-02-13): See also: Compositor 1.0.

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