WhizzyTeX

Active-DVI in action Emacs in action

An Emacs minor mode for
incremental viewing of
LaTeX documents
.

Start mini demo

WhizzyTeX provides a minor mode for Emacs or XEmacs, a (bash) shell-script daemon and some LaTeX macros. It works under Unix with gv and xdvi viewers, but the Active-DVI viewer will provide much better visual effects and will offer more functionalities.

Warning!

You need version 1.4.0 to work with the lastest version of latex.ltx in textlive 2021.

Versions

The current version is whizzytex-1.4.0.tgz (see Announce). The previous stable version is whizzytex-1.3.5.tgz (see CHANGES).

There is also a working version (see last update), which you should only use if you wish to test or experiment with new features. In particular, this may contain serious bugs.

Some older versions are still available.

Requirements

WhizzyTeX runs on Unix-based platforms (you may still see the FAQ for unsupported use with Cygwin). It requires LaTeX, Bash, either Emacs or XEmacs, and at least one viewer, which could be DVI-based such as xdvi or advi (Active-DVI) or Postscript-based such as gv provided you also have a DVI to Postsctipt converter such as dvips). However, the advanced features of WhizzyTeX only works for Active-DVI previewer, version 1.6.0 or higher.

Documentation

Installation and user manual are available in HTML, PDF, or PS, or DVI formats. Most of the documentation is also available as online Emacs help (via help for the function whizzytex-mode and following hyper-links).

See also the FAQ.

Send bugs to whizzytex-bugs@inria.fr

Join the users' mailing list.

Disclaimer

WhizzyTeX is still under development and may contain dangerous bugs. You may wish to save copies of the file (and of the whole directory you are working in) before WhizzyTeX-ing.

Viewers

Both xdvi (for viewing DVI) and gv (for viewing Postscript) are likely to be installed by default. WhizzyTeX should correctly work with both of them (xdvi is faster, but does not correctly render colors and Postscript). However, when reloading a file, both of then first clean the page, and redraw online. Even though xdvi is quite fast, this produces a flashing effect that may be annoying or worse make you feel a little unconfortable. Thus, we highly recommend the use of Active-DVI, a DVI viewer written in OCaml.

Active-DVI

Active-DVI redraws a page in a background pixmap, and only display the completely formatted output. This avoids flashing, even on slow computers.

Furthermore, WhizzyTeX can take advantage of some more advances capabilities of Active-DVI and enable more features. For instance, it will then automatically turn pages of the viewer to display the page containing the cursor in Emacs, or conversely, adjust the Emacs cursor to the source file position when you click in the viewer window.

In addition, Active-DVI also offers facilities for presentations that goes beyong the simple viewing of a file, and it can be advantageously used for talks with annimations.

Copyright

WhizzyTeX is Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011 INRIA and distributed under the GNU General Public License. See the enclosed file COPYING.

Acknowledgements

Benjamin Pierce gave me the idea of writting WhizzyTeX. He and many users have made interesting suggestions or provided useful feedback and should all be thanked. Sven Luther and Junichi Uekawa, Debian maintainers of the WhizzyTeX package, have contributed to its early popularization and helped improving its packaging. Some people who made more significant contributions may be listed in the CHANGES log file or other source files.

Author

Didier Remy


Last-modified: "2011-08-01 10:28:20 remy"