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Posts Tagged ‘LaTeX’

Latex editors and rubber

August 8th, 2010 by

Whether you are a frequent latex user, and especially if you are just starting off with it, you must have encountered situations where compiling the document correctly gets downright painful. Or found it just irritating to google every time or look up a cheat-sheet [pdf] to insert a not-so-common symbol. Or you know about the excellent application kile but as a GNOME/LXDE/Xfce user you did not want a zillion kde libraries installed.

I have started maintaining three packages, namely Texmaker, TeXworks and Rubber, in the Publishing repository. These applications make working with and compiling latex documents user-friendly and painless.

Texmaker

This is a frontend for editing latex documents much like kile (which is distributed with openSUSE 11.3 and prior), with several useful features:

  • integrated pdf viewer
  • user-friendly interface based on qt
  • wizards to generate code
  • integrated error and warning viewer
  • an integrated LaTeX to html conversion tool
  • based on qt with no dependence on kde libraries, which means somebody using a non-kde desktop might install it without pulling in one big chunk of the kde base  (as a GNOME user, I find this to be a problem with kile), and so integrates well with a non-KDE desktop as well.

Install on openSUSE

openSUSE 11.2 (from my home project, this requires libqt4 >= 4.6.1)

1click-installer for Texmaker

openSUSE 11.3

1click-installer for Texmaker

Factory

1click-installer for Texmaker

TeXworks

Also based on the qt toolkit, TeXworks is a Latex frontend with an integrated viewer that supports source/preview synchronisation. This makes it possible for you to right-click on the embedded preview [pdf, ps, etc] and choose to go to the corresponding line/paragraph in the latex source. I think, but I am not sure, that TeXworks is the only Linux application which uses source/preview synchronisation at present.

Install on openSUSE

openSUSE 11.2

1click installer for texworks

openSUSE 11.3

1click installer for texworks

Factory

1click installer for texworks

Rubber

Rubber is a command line application that automates compilation of latex documents, in the sense that it takes care of getting cross-referencing, citations and so on just right with one run, while it takes the native texlive commands (latex/pdflatex) as many as four runs to do so. Rubber makes the process of compiling a source file into the final document completely automated including processing bibliographic references or indices, as well as compilation or conversion of figures and several post-processing work.

Install on openSUSE

openSUSE 11.2

1click installer for rubber

openSUSE 11.3

1click installer for rubber

Factory

1click installer for rubber

Here’s hoping latex users (esp. beginners) on openSUSE will find these applications useful.

Have a lot of fun.

Bye.

——-

Update: The command latexmk works similar to rubber (i.e. running latex/pdflatex as many times as necessary to get the cross-referencing right), while kile/okular can be configured for source/document synchronisation similar to texworks as pointed out in the comments.