WhizzyTeX - Real-time LaTeX previewing for Emacs
cristal.inria.fr
cristal.inria.fr
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.
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.)