Monday, August 18, 2008

Editing Latex Files under Windows with LatexEditor

Another very interesting tool for editing and compiling Latex files under Windows is LatexEditor (LED). It has the advantage over Scientific Word of being free.


It is not WYSIWYG or WYSIWYM (WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouMean) but it included a DVI viewer that can show the compiled document just next to the Latex source window.
LED also has many customizable tool bars (and you should customize them because the default configuration is not really as useful as what you get when you configure them to your needs) that lighten the burden of text typing .
It also integrates quite powerful spell check dictionaries and thesaurus. It can also convert files between different code pages during the opening and saving of the files: you can have an 8-bits version with accents on the screen (allowing easy spell check and readibility) and keep on the hard disk the 7-bits version where é is coded, as usual in Latex, \'{e}. You must customize filters to obtain such functionality (see, for example, the filter for French characters I have proposed on the LED support forums).

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