Comment by cefstat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cefstat | Hacker News Reader

I've downloaded the beta and played for 5 minutes. First remarks and thoughts:

- When the realtime typesetting works it is impressive. For example, changing the coordinates in a tikz picture results in almost immediate change of the PDF. And command / environment auto-completion is very smooth, very well done.

- However, the typesetter can get stuck and this happened for me in the first try. I am aware it is only the first public beta so I guess things will improve.

- Please, oh please, can any specialized TeX editor reproduce the following feature I have setup in Emacs? In the editor (not live preview) display standard mathematical symbols as symbols and not as commands. For example, make \alpha appear as α or \int appear as ∫. This is so nice that I hesitate moving to other tex editors because I know I will miss it.

Thanks, I'm glad it is working out for you.

Regarding the bug: Is there any chance you could email us at support at vallettaventures dot com? that way we can get back to you when there is a fix. Also, we may need a spindump to find out where it is locked up, so we can send instructions on how to create that if you have a moment.

We've had a request or two for this in the past. I've added your vote, the plan during the 1.8 series is to do a series of small updates, and this would be nice.

Personally, I'd be really against that feature, because I think Unicode symbols as math juxtaposed with monospace can look awful. If they do implement it, please keep a toggle to turn it off.

The emacs package I'm thinking of actually renders the snippets and replaces them with png images inline.

That's preview-latex which is included with the AUCTeX package in emacs

Yes, this sort of feature would always be gated by a preference option. Some will like it, some won't.

Right now in Texpad if you place the cursor in a command for a math symbol for a few seconds, a popover will show that symbol.

Which extension do you use in Emacs to get the symbols?

I am not aware of an extension doing this. I wrote some elisp for doing this a few years back.

Can you share your latex setup?

cdlatex-mode has that feature IIRC. Probably auctex does too.

Its something related to prettify and auctex; unfortunately im on mobile atm.

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