Monday, October 17, 2016

Papeeria News, Oct 17: references completion

TL;DR: autocompletion suggests labels and bibliography references

LaTeX is very good at  referencing document elements and citing bilibography. If you want to reference a figure in your text, you just put \label tag in the figure and use \ref command to reference it. If you need to reference a biliography record, you use \cite command. Both \ref and \cite format a reference using chosen style,so that "see the results of comparison with Other Product \cite{competitors} in the table \ref{competitor-analysis}" converts to "see the results of comparison with Other Product [3] in the table 2".

Unfortunately it is easy to forget the id of a referenced element, and when  you need to type it in the \cite tag, you often would open a bibliography file to recall what id did you assign to a paper.

Papeeria will help you a little bit by suggesting the list of labels and bibliography records in autocompletion popup. They should show up automatically when cursor enters \ref or \cite tag, provided that the project has been previously compiled. We extract labels and bibliography records from the artifacts produced by TeX compiler so we need at least one compile cycle.


Monday, October 3, 2016

Papeeria News, Oct 3: instant preview of the math formulae

TL;DR: Papeeria shows math formula previews

LaTeX excels at typesetting maths. However, if you make a typo or mistake in non-trivial math equation you get no immediate feedback and have to recompile the document to see if firmula looks good. Papeeria provides live preview of mathematics so you can see how the equation looks like without recompiling the document.

Formula preview shows up at the bottom of the text editor automatically when cursor enters math mode which is either delimited with single or double-dollar symbols, or inside equation environment. If cursor is already at the bottom of the editor, the preview moves to the top edge.

Matrix in the formula preview

Under the hood we use great KaTeX library developed by folks from Khan Academy, so the supported macros are restricted to the subset supported by KaTeX. The subset is prettywide, so chances are that your equations will look fine. KaTeX paints unknown tags with red color, so even if there is something which it can't render, you will still see partial result mixed with unrecognized tags.