Re: Equation editors [Was: Re: CUPS]

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu>]

On 19 Aug 2002, Thanasis Kinias wrote:

[snip]
> Please don't judge (La)TeX by LyX ;)
> LyX's interface didn't do it for me, either.  I just use vim for my
> LaTeX instead.
[snip]
> How's
>
> \hat{\sigma}^2
>
> strike you?  That's pure LaTeX unencumbered by LyX's GUI.
>
> I took the liberty of putting a PDF showing a couple lines from your
> prof's notes up at <http://www.public.asu.edu/~tkinias/foo.pdf>, to give
> you an idea of how LaTeX renders math.  The source is there, too, at
> <http://www.public.asu.edu/~tkinias/foo.tex>.
>
> To be sure, LaTeX has a bit of a learning curve, but if you master it
> you'll never want to muck with WP again for math.

I'm surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned preview-latex. This is
used with Auctex/Emacs, and generates an image of math equations (and
other things where the source code is hard to read) right in the emacs
buffer. You can toggle the image on and off, so you are either looking at
the actual Latex code, or as a fairly accurate representation of what that
code will look like in the final document. You can find more at the
homepage at http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net/

I used Auctex/GNU Emacs to write Latex for years, and one big problem was
that beyond a certain level of complexity the latex code became really
hard to read.  Preview-latex makes things much more pleasant. It is,
veritably, a godsend (at least from my perspective). If you use emacs, and
even if you don't you should give it a try.

And yes, there is a Debian package for it called preview-latex.

                                                          Faheem.