Hacker News Reader

Comment by newt0311 | Hacker News Reader

That really depends on experience. I remember when I started out with latex that it would take me hours to do the simplest of things but now, I take notes in it in class on the fly and I can handle all the formatting immediately. Also, using latex with an inferior editor will make life excruciating. I would advise emacs with latex-mode (and in my case, several hundred lines of customizations) but vim is also a good choice. If however, you try latex with crap like notepad, nano, pico, or gedit... well, you are asking for hell and you will get it.

View on HN

Is there any way to have it display the rendered page as-you-type? That would make taking notes much easier, since you could see the equations or such that you were writing as your wrote them.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience with LaTeX, and I'm not yet in college so I can't take notes using a laptop... I'm just being curious here.)

http://www.lyx.org/

Emacs running under X will do basic formatting (italic, bold, larger text, etc.) all on its own. There are packages out there that will do more elaborate previews. Googling gives: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/auctex

I second auctex, it's preview mode is a godsend when formatting tables and formulas. It also has dozens of helpers for switxhing environments, defining and using macros, etc.

It comes with reftex, which, by itself, makes it worth learning. Reftex automatically searches bibtex files for regexps, makes cross-references easy and a lot of other useful things.

As scott_s suggested, LyX is a prominent LaTeX WYSIWYG editor. I use TeXmacs (http://texmacs.org) on Linux because I input a lot of Greek characters and do a lot of Maxima computations while taking class notes, and the ease of Ctrl-Enter makes it like Mathematica notebooks but much faster for writing. It doesn't save natively in LaTeX format like LyX does, and doesn't implement all of LaTeX, but it's an option worth considering if you're in a similar situation.

As has already been mentioned, LyX and TeXmacs are possibilities. Try plain LateX a few times before jumping for the wysiwyg option. It may be nice to see the final output immediately but the benefit of macros combined with the advanced capabilities of editors like emacs makes pure latex a breeze to work with once you get the hang of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com