Re: [toolbox] LaTeXiT 1.2 beta

[Will R. <wi...@gu...>]

On 3 Jul 2005, at 9:27 AM, Pierre Chatelier wrote:

> Aaron : when dragging from the library, the equation label can be  
> dropped in text-only areas (without \ref{...} though}
> Herbert : preferences are updated, Command-T does work, and a zoom  
> has been added for the preview pane
>
> Feel free to add remarks, criticize the interface, and so on.

This looks very promising!
First thoughts:

  - I LOVE the hidden-by-dragbar preamble. I'd like to see something  
like this in my actual LaTeX editor.

  - I also like to window re-use and ESPECIALLY the log file parsing  
that occurs when you make an error, although I suspect a little more  
information should be provided. For example, if I try and typeset "1  
\nq 2", it says "Undefined control sequence". The actual log file says

    ! Undefined control sequence.
    l.4 1 \nq
              2

so if it could be reliably determine what the offending token is it  
would be nice to see that as well. You could even go the easy way out  
and do the equivalent of (warning: pseudocode and shell script ahead!)

   if $error = "Undefined control sequence." then
     echo \\`echo "l.4 1 \nq" | sed s/.*\\\\\\\\//`
   fi

to find the offending command. (BTW, anyone know any easier way to  
isolate string elements on a line than my crappy sed technique?)

  - I think I like the use of those things that look like tabs but  
are actually buttons. The old school way would be to use radio  
buttons, but I'm undecided if these things are actually better than  
radio buttons.

- Since we're talking LaTeX, it would be better to write
    Display (\[...\])
   because $$...$$ is, to be strict, incorrect.
   But I think users tend to know enough of what's going on to be  
able to write
    | Display | Inline | Text |
   in those buttons and put \[...\] , etc., in a tooltip.

- For a future version, it'd be good to add a toolbar for the  
LaTeXise (don't suppose we've got enough of an anti-American majority  
to get rid of the "z"? Can this be localised?) button as well as a  
button for the drawer, etc.

  - I'm not sure if it's necessary to use \usepackage[applemac] 
{inputenc}. For a start, I think [utf8] would be better for forwards  
compatibility, and second -- since this thing will *mostly* be used  
for maths, I think if people *do* want accented characters then they  
can add this line to the preamble themselves.


Now a couple of small problems:

  - European decimal mark :) Can this be localised?

  - The cropping seems slightly over-enthusiastic. But not as bad as  
TeX itself! For example:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\parindent=0pt
\voffset=-1in
\hoffset=-1in
\setbox0=\hbox{$1=3$}
\dimen0=\ht0
\advance\dimen0\dp0
\pdfpageheight=\dimen0
\pdfpagewidth=\wd0
\shipout\box0
\end{document}
% (Stolen ages ago from Maarten, perhaps)

Cuts off heaps of the top of the numbers because their bounding boxes  
aren't equal to their vertical extremes. LaTeXiT produces similarly  
cropped results, and 5 minutes of tinkering didn't give me anything  
satisfactory.

The preview package seems to give the same results as LaTeXiT:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[active,pdftex,textmath,tightpage]{preview}
\begin{document}
$1=3$
\end{document}

Is this actually what is used to generate the output? I couldn't work  
it out from looking at the log file.

  - Probably some small adjustments could be made to the layout of  
some things (the zoom control, especially, seems too close to the  
border of the window), but I'll leave that for another time...

Great work!

Will