I\'m writing my thesis with latex (for technical text, it\'s way easier than Wor
ID: 661915 • Letter: I
Question
I'm writing my thesis with latex (for technical text, it's way easier than Word). However, writing LaTeX on editor, and then manually compiling PDF for preview is rather slow and cumbersome.
Is there a good LaTeX editor for OS X that:
Always shows the newest PDF (auto-refreshes it after it's compiled)
Provides autocomplete for latex commands (for example, extbf{} for bold text). Might even show some help messages for those.
Preferably have at least some BibTeX (references) support: autocomplete for reference names. Automatically compiling BibTeX whenever something changed (new entries or references were added) would be pretty useful.
Preferably shows errors (invalid syntax, missing } etc.) real-time instead of dumping LaTeX output showing errors among huge number of other messages
Explanation / Answer
I would suggest Texworks. I use it under Ubuntu, but it's available for OSX and Windows as well. Cross-platform compatibility is always a plus.
When you press the green 'Typeset' button it refreshes the PDF, which is shown alongside the code (in a separate window you can position yourself). (You may need to run it twice, since the bibtex file is (re)compiled separately).
Provides autocomplete via tab key.
It doesn't have native bibtex autocomplete, but I just went looking and found a script you can add to Texworks to make that work: Texworks-scripts autocomplete. I haven't used it yet, but will be trying this out. It's demonstrated here.
It doesn't have real-time error warnings though. It does of course have syntax highlighting, which should prevent most syntax mistakes. You can also jump from an error in the errors tab to the corresponding line in the source.
Another nice feature is 'Auto-Follow focus', which makes the pdf view match where your cursor is in the source; you can also 'Jump to Source' from the pdf.
I don't know the OSX software landscape, so there may of course be better options out there I don't know about.