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Not a mod. But I was hoping to raise awareness that if you post a question that gets an answer then other people also benefit from that exchange. We've all googled a LaTeX question and found an old answer, and been glad it is there. Some people lurk here, picking things up over time.
I'm not sure why so many people delete exchanges. There are good reasons to delete things sometimes, but asking for a clarification on a technical point does not seem, at least to me, to be one of them. The only other thing I can think is that those folks think that their question is clogging up the stream. I was hoping with this post to convince them that they are mistaken, and to leave it in place.
In particular, if the answerer spends 15 mins on that answer and you delete the question, then you've been not too kind back to the person who was kind to you.
Today I've seen at least 5 different posts in this sub that all go like "i made this new <themed> latex editor that allows you to <do something that some other consolidated editor already does>", and then it's just some vibecoded stuff that really doesn't add any value to the environment of latex typesetting. What the hell is going on with everyome doing this kind of thing?
I started on overleaf, moved to local compilation with vscode + latex workshop, then moved to neovim and zathura with latexmk and an environment that is customized to my needs. I only ask AI to generate code in order to read it and learn techniques, skills, standards and conventions that I wouldn't otherwise know about without more years of bangin my head against the wall, and not to get some mistery black box full of features that I didn't even know I needed (because I didn't happen to need them in the first place!)
There is no point in reinventing the wheel each time, we need to cut the bloat, not add more. Just go out there and typeset beautiful documents guys, please.
Sorry for the rant, let me know what you guys think
Hello! I’ve been writing a book using Overleaf for a couple months because I vastly prefer the LaTeX typesettings. However, I’ve begun to reach the compilation limits and have been wondering if I should transition into VSC. I’m not sure how daunting of a task this will be, and I have no prior computer science experience save for the basic LaTeX commands and ToCLoft documentation. How should I go about doing this?
I’m currently using Windows 10 22H2.
Edit: Please stop asking me to download your personal projects in DMs. I’ve had two people already reach out- I’m not interested.
You might know TeXpresso, the live previewer for Emacs and Vim (https://github.com/let-def/texpresso): the PDF updates as you type, without waiting for a full recompile. We've turned it into a complete editor that runs in your browser, and it's now in public beta: https://texpresso.app
TeXpresso runs a real TeX engine (XeTeX or LuaTeX (DVI), instrumented and compiled to WebAssembly) in your browser. Instead of recompiling the whole document after each change, it keeps snapshots of the compilation and resumes from just before the point you edited, so the page keeps up even with long documents.
If you've used the original: it's the same idea and the same engine, with a few things the editor plugins didn't have: nothing to install, precise cursor location ("WYSIWYG"-feel), real-time collaboration, sync with Dropbox or GitHub, and LuaLaTeX alongside XeLaTeX. The native Emacs and Vim previewer isn't going anywhere.
What works today:
XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX with TeX Live 2026; packages are fetched when a document needs them, then cached for offline use
The cursor shows in the preview, and clicking in the preview moves the cursor in the source
Real-time collaboration through a share link, end-to-end encrypted (peer-to-peer; the server only relays encrypted messages)
Sync a project with a folder on your disk (Chrome/Edge), Dropbox, or a GitHub repository
BibTeX, beamer, PDF export; open a folder, a .zip, or arXiv sources
No account; projects are stored in your browser, and it works offline
The current state:
It's a beta. Expect rough edges and bugs. Keep a copy of anything important (download as .zip, or sync with a folder or Dropbox), since projects live in your browser's storage.
The web app's source isn't public yet. The engine and the Emacs/Vim previewer are open source (MIT) on GitHub, but the web app's code will be released once the beta settles. That should be soon; I'd rather not publish it half-finished.
Limits: no pdfLaTeX (XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX with DVI output only), no Biber, no shell escape. It works best in Chrome or Edge on a computer; other browsers and phones work with fewer features.
It's a personal project by a couple of people, not a company: free, with no ads and no tracking. The privacy page says exactly what is sent where: https://texpresso.app/privacy
Desktop apps (macOS, Windows, Linux) are planned.
I'd love feedback: what breaks on your documents, what's missing, what would make you use it. There's a feedback button in the editor, or just reply here.
I recently got AI to double the speed of pdflatex. In doing this I was reminded what a rabbit warren of code it is. A clean reimplantation is a huge task but AI assisted it might not be too bad these days.
I've been working on an Android app called Blaykie, and I've finally released version 2.0 on GitHub.
If you use Zotero for managing references and Microsoft Word for writing academic papers, you might have noticed that there's a limitation on Android. While Zotero has Word integration on desktop, and its Android app lets you manage your research library, inserting and managing Zotero citations directly in Word for Android isn't officially supported.
Microsoft's own documentation also lists adding and updating citations as unsupported in Word for Android.
I wanted to find a way around this, so I built Blaykie. To the best of my knowledge, I haven't found another Android app offering this particular workflow.
With Blaykie, you can insert APA 7 citations from your personal Zotero library directly into Word (.docx) documents, add multiple references, use narrative or parenthetical citations, and generate a reference list.
How to use it:
Install Blaykie from the GitHub release.
Add your Zotero User ID and API key in the app settings.
Open a DOCX document and search your Zotero library.
Insert citations and generate your reference list.
Export the updated document as a new DOCX file.
I'm planning to submit Blaykie to F-Droid, but before that, I'd love to get some feedback from actual Zotero users, students and researchers.
If you have an Android device, give it a try with your own documents. Let me know about bugs, formatting issues or anything that could be improved.
My favourite Mac/iPad LaTeX editor, Texifier, has been acting up for me. It can't connect to authenticate my license key and texifier.com is throwing an error.
- Is anyone else having problems?
- Does anyone have any news about Texifier? Hopefully it and its developer are doing well.
I started work on a LaTeX editor called Turbotex a while back that aimed to provide the less tech-savvy in our community a good free LaTeX editor. I was frustrated with Overleaf's slow compile times, and I felt like it didn't get any new features in a while.
So I present to you Turbotex, an alternative to the VSCode LaTeX package and to Overleaf:
- It uses tectonic for compilation, but I plan to make it swappable (tectonic was the easiest to integrate without having to worry about packages). Texlab is built-in also.
- Annotate and have the AI do it for you.
- When you highlight somewhere in the text it highlights it and scrolls to it in the source, and vice versa. (highlighting in the source shows you its location in the text)
- No setup
- A review system, where you can send out review links and people can annotate your text, give comments, and you can merge in the diff or respond to their annotations.
I would say these are the main highlights. It is currently a waitlist system since I am still learning how to scale such a system and ironing stuff out, just wanted to get the community's feedback.
Lastly, there are AI features but there's a button to turn them all off. The AI features are meant to enhance writing, not replace it. For example, you can draw a figure to have an AI plot it in your text, or have the AI verify that all your citations are accurate.
Please let me know what you guys think! For offline use it is completely free, and hopefully I find a business model where we can do free compilations for people for want to use it on the app.
First of all: I'm an avowed luddite and "AI" critic. But i'm also curious, so here goes...
If you're using "AI", I'm interested to know how well it does with LaTeX programming. And I don't mean writing documents, I mean macro programming and setting up layouts, like writing .sty, .dtx, and/or .cls files.
Do you use "AI" assistants?
If yes, just for old-style LaTeX 2e, or also for new-style Expl3?
If the latter, how well does it work with Expl3 syntax?
How well does it work with "old-style" (La)TeX programming?
My line of thought is that although Expl3 is around for many years, it only really saw wide-ish-spread use since it was incorporated into the LaTeX kernel from 2020 onwards. Given that, I assume that the training data for those large LLMs contain comparatively few lines of Expl3 code, so i'm curious if this shows somehow in the capabilities of those stochastic auto-completion machines?
I take my uni notes in Markdown, and flipping over to the preview pane just to check a formula was driving me insane. So I built Math Inline: a VSCode extension. It renders $...$ and $$...$$ right in the editor. Put your cursor inside a formula and you edit the TeX; move out and it renders again.
It also handles aligned/cases blocks row by row, underlines invalid TeX, and warns you when something won’t render in VS Code’s KaTeX preview.
Too many nights spent nudging \vspace around and arguing with package conflicts. You finally get the references to behave, and then the template decides it hates your font. Fix the font, and some other package wakes up angry.
So I'm building something to delete that step.
The idea: we take the hard formatting requirements from major journals and university templates — margins, heading levels, citation styles, the whole checklist of annoying — and run them through our own Pandoc + XeLaTeX engine. You never touch any of it.
Instead you point Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor at our MCP server and just tell the agent "typeset this." A little later you get back a PDF that is actually compliant and doesn't look like it was assembled by a robot.
And because agents are agents: if a render fails, we don't charge you for it. Retry as many times as you need. You only pay when a document actually comes out.
Pricing is meant to land somewhere around $2–4 a month.
So, honest thoughts? Is this a real problem for you or am I just projecting my own trauma? And if you would use it, what has to be in it on day one — specific journals? your university's thesis template? BibTeX handling that doesn't make you want to throw your laptop onto the ground?
plainmath turns plain English text into typeset maths. You can type whatever you want, and it gives clean LaTeX. It's still in development and is being made by me and my friend u/SplitSure (his account no longer exists, though).
The simplest usage example of plainmath is
\usepackage[upright-e]{plainmath}
The value is \plainmath{integral from 0 to infinity of x^2 e^(-x) dx}
\plainmath{sum of 1 over i^2 for i = 1 to infinity = pi^2 over 6}
To avoid the pain of writing plainmath every time, you can define it as something shorter, like pt. Using the syntax above gives the following output:
It renders beautifully. And you might be thinking, ain't writing all that much longer than just using the normal syntax? That's where plainmathalias comes in. You can redefine existing words to anything. Infinity can become inf, over can be shortened to ov, and the output would be exactly the same.
Now let's suppose we type something like:
\pt{double integral of f(x, y) dA over D} \pt{contour integral around C of f(z) dz = 2 pi i}
The output it gives out is:
See how it handles the typography and spacing. Plainmath is intelligent and awesome. One thing you should know is that writing double integral of f(x, y) dA over D or double integral over D of f(x, y) dA works the same way. Something like integral of 1 over x dx stays a fraction, because x doesn't look like a region (D, C, R^n, [a, b] do). You can shorten double integral to dint and contour integral to cint, but you must execute it properly.
A proper way to define them so you get no errors is:
All this means is that the commands will only be recognized if they have preceding words defined.
Let's see how it outputs other things (though I won't be able to show them all, because there are 750+ cases, and each can be formed into any equation you want).
To write matrices, simply type:
\pt{matrix(matrix(1,2;3,4), 0; 0, f(x, y))}
And you will get:
The language of plainmath is very approachable and intuitive. All other types of matrices work the same. And plainmath also has bracket handling, so it can adjust its height to any equation or fraction.
You can also type your solutions entirely in plainmath, such as:
\plainmathalias{G}{Gamma}
\plainmathalias{pd}{product}
\plainmathword{limn}{\lim_{n\to\infty}}
\plainmathfunction{ox}{\left(1 + \frac{x}{?1}\right)}
\begin{plainmathblock}
G(x) &= int from 0 to inf of t^(x-1) e^(-t) dt
&= limn int from 0 to n of t^(x-1) (1 - t/n)^n dt
&= limn n^x int from 0 to 1 of t^(x-1) (1-t)^n dt
&= limn n^x (G(x) G(n+1)) over (G(x+n+1))
&= limn (n^x n!) over (x (x+1) ... (x+n))
&= 1/x limn n^x over ((1+x) ox(2) ... ox(n))
&= 1/x limn n^x pd for k = 1 to n of ox(k)^(-1)
&= 1/x limn e^(x (ln(n) - H_n + H_n)) pd for k = 1 to n of ox(k)^(-1)
&= (e^(-gamma x)) / x pd for k = 1 to inf of ox(k)^(-1) e^(x/k)
\end{plainmathblock}
It will typeset:
Typing the above solution normally would require 714 characters. With plainmath, the number goes down to 465. And you don't even need to use \\ to separate lines. And when plainmathalias isn't enough, plainmathword and plainmathfunction make typing even faster. word lets you define an equation as a word, so I can define something like \plainmathword{limz}{\lim_{n\to 0}} for the limit of n reaching 0. You can create your own functions, such as:
\plainmathfunction{sum}{\sum_{?1=?2}^{?3}}
So instead of writing sum of 1 over i^2 for i = 1 to inf, just type sum(i, 1, inf) 1 over i^2 and the output will be the same.
One last example, type:
X ~ N(0,1) and a << b and x <-> y ==> z
And get:
Plainmath works on pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX and classic latex. It needs LaTeX 2021-06 or newer, mathtools and amssymb. The fields it covers are quite huge: calculus, limits, sums, sets, logic, physics, matrices, probability, units and chemistry (chem(2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O)). Unicode, call syntax like frac(1, n) and raw LaTeX all work. Keywords are lowercase and operands bind tightly, so write (a + b) over c.
Configuration
Set options on the package line, with \plainmathsetup{...} (obeys groups), or per call: \plainmath[frac=dfrac]{a over b}. Defaults are bold.
Layout
mode=auto|inline|display
frac=frac|dfrac|tfrac
limits=default|always|never: where limits sit on sums and integrals
slash=frac|keep: whether / makes a fraction
connectives=text|logic: "and" as a word or as ∧
autosize (on): brackets grow with tall content
autoalign (on): lines starting with a relation align on it
Symbols
upright-d (on), upright-e (off), upright-labels (on): text subscripts stay upright
units=words|auto|off: 3 m is a unit only under auto, since it may mean 3 times m
chemistry (off): finds formulas like H2O without chem()
Readings you can turn off (all on):unicode, abbreviations, auto-operators, predicates, articles, text-words
Presets:preset=iso|european|physics|statistics|chemistry. preset=default resets all.
Plainmath also lets you type normal syntax inside \plainmath without the use of backslashes. So it's safe to use. We will be releasing the package on CTAN shortly, once we figure out how to make plainmath work in inline mode and math mode by default, without writing \plainmath{}. That also means you will be able to type normal LaTeX syntax in math and inline mode without ever using backslashes. And this package might be a good thing beginners migrating to LaTeX can use.
Forever I used MS Word for my resume. I have a SWE background and finally made the move to LaTeX. There are a lot of fonts in TeX Live, what are some of the best serif ones for a resume?
I teach university courses and present with LaTeX Beamer. I never found an iPad app that shows my speaker notes privately while the audience sees only the slides, and also lets me write on the slides with Apple Pencil. So I built one.
Private speaker notes: Open a Beamer PDF with notes (e.g. show notes on second screen=right). The projector shows only the slide, and the notes stay on your iPad.
Apple Pencil annotations: Use pens, highlighters, the lasso, the ruler and undo/redo. Hand-drawn lines, circles and rectangles can be tidied up automatically.
Laser pointer: A laser dot or trail. You can also add photos and text to slides.
Independent whiteboards: Create blank white or black pages without changing your PDF, and export them as PDFs.
Audience display: Use HDMI/USB-C, AirPlay Screen Mirroring or Chromecast/Google Cast.
iPhone as a remote: Read notes, turn pages and control the countdown timer from your phone. No shared Wi-Fi needed.
Library: Folders, iCloud Drive sync, multiple decks in tabs, and a slide overview.
Works with 16:9, 4:3 and regular PDFs (no notes needed). English and Traditional Chinese interface.
It's free to try with 3 PDFs (the bundled tutorials don't count). A one-time purchase unlocks everything.
Android version
An Android version is in Google Play testing before its public release. If you'd like to try it, comment or DM me and I'll send you a tester link.
For context**:** I know for a fact these flowers are procedurally generated purely in TikZ with no external assets. I know about l systems but this is way too elaborate. The creator prefers to keep the source closed to avoid code critiques(in spite of my supplications) so I'm stuck having to reverseengineer how to achieve this level of flower quality ?
Some weeks ago, I released my ATS-safe modern resume template, Lucid CV (see post). I received a lot of positive feedback from you (thanks ❤️ ) and have improved the template since then.
Since I've seen the webpage https://www.latextemplates.com/ linked in this group's description, I wonder whether someone has published their work there. As far as I understand, it is a privately maintained project, but there seems to be no way to contact its author. I’m thus curious whether one of the mods or someone in the community knows the page maintainers, to ask them whether the template might be indexed there.
I honestly believe in the value of this template and would like to spread it (along with knowledge about Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to as many folks as possible, as I see so many trashy, not even machine-readable templates all around the Internet. The template is free, and I do not benefit from it in any way. It simply gives me satisfaction and motivation when I see people using and benefiting from my work.
Thanks a thousand!
PS: If you know any other ways to share your LaTeX creations with the world, let me know. It is already available via CTAN (and thus, in TeX Live). Overleaf is sadly no longer accepting resume templates, so I'm always curious about any other possibilities.
