Friday, November 5, 2010

Allow me to recommend AUCTeX, preview-latex, and Vincent Goulet's Emacs for OS X Modified

I am wanting to start typesetting my articles in LaTeX rather than using Pages+Endnote+Mathtype or, worse, Word. I don't like the LaTeX writing process of write, run LaTeX, run LaTeX again a couple of times to get the equation numbering correct, convert the dvi to a pdf, open the pdf, find a typo in an equation, cry, go to the bathroom, make a cup of tea, write some more. AUCTeX is a package for Emacs that makes it easier to write LaTeX with handy keyboard shortcuts and syntax highlighting, for example. Most notably, AUCTeX comes bundled with a tool, preview-latex, which presents rendered math equations in-line.

This requires a GUI-enabled Emacs. On the Mac, Cocoa Emacs is the most current. Vincent Goulet has prepared a special build of Cocoa Emacs, Emacs for OS X Modified, which includes AUCTeX as well as ESS and psvn if you're interested in those, too.

I don't know if this is a common problem, but for my installation, preview-latex didn't work properly until I disabled TeX-PDF-mode by C-c C-t C-p or adding (TeX-PDF-mode nil) to my .emacs file. I got the idea from this mailing list discussion.

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