TeXpresso: live rendering and error reporting for LaTeX

Note: this is an experimental tool.

Important: this repository uses submodules. Clone using git clone --recurse-submodules.

TeXpresso has been tested on Linux and macOS and should work with both AMD64 and Apple Silicon architectures. Here is a sample recording of me editing and browsing @fabiensanglard Game Engine Black Book: Doom in TeXpresso (using my emacs theme):

compress.mp4

It is made of two components:

• this repository which implements the texpresso binary
• the tectonic/ git-submodule which implements a patched version of Tectonic that produces the texpresso-tonic helper binary

At the moment, it requires a functional installation of Tectonic. Install it first and make it compile simple TeX file to generate initial LaTeX format. For instance, run "tectonic test/simple.tex" at the root of this repository.

Building

If all dependencies are installed and out-of-the-box configuration works, make all should be sufficient to build both texpresso and texpresso-tonic in build/ directory.

For Arch Linux users, a PKGBUILD is available in the AUR that builds from the latest Git HEAD on installation.

Otherwise, read below.

Build TeXpresso

First make sure the dependencies are available: pkg-config, re2c, SDL2, mupdf (and its own dependencies: libjpeg, libpng, freetype2, gumbo, ...). Under macOS, brew is also used to find local files.

If it succeeds, make texpresso produces build/texpresso.

Other targets are:

• config to generate configuration in Makefile.config (automatically called during building)
• dev produces build/texpresso-dev which supports hot-reloading to ease development
• debug produces debugging tools in build/
• clean to remove intermediate build files
• distclean to remove all build files (build/ and Makefile.config)

If build fails, try tweaking the configuration flags in Makefile.config.

Build TeXpresso-tonic (Tectonic)

First you need an environment that is able to build Tectonic: a functional rust and cargo installation, etc. Check tectonic documentation.

Then make sure that the git submodules were initialized:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Then make texpresso-tonic should work.

Testing TeXpresso

If both commands built successfully, you can try TeXpresso using:

build/texpresso test/simple.tex

This is just a minimal test to make sure that TeXpresso is installed correctly. If TeXpresso window does not display the document, please report an issue. Recommended use is with Emacs, see below. Vim support will come later.

Emacs mode

TeXpresso comes with an Emacs mode. The source can be found in emacs/texpresso.el. Load this file in Emacs (using M-X load-file; it is also compatible with require).

Start TeXpresso with M-x texpresso. The prompt will let you select the master/root TeX file. It will try to start texpresso command. If it is not possible, it will open (customize-variable 'texpresso-binary) to let you set the path to texpresso binary.

To work correctly, texpresso needs texpresso-tonic helper; when copying them, make sure they are both in the same directory.

M-x texpresso-display-output will open a small window listing TeX warnings and errors on the current page. Use M-x texpresso-next-page and M-x texpresso-previous-page to move between pages without leaving Emacs.

Navigating TeXpresso window

Keyboard controls:

• ←, →: change page
• p (for "page"): switch between "fit-to-page" and "fit-to-width" zoom modes
• c ("crop"): crop borders
• q ("quit"): quit
• i ("invert"): dark mode
• I : use Emacs theme
• t ("top"): toggle stay-on-top (above Emacs window)
• b ("border"): toggle window borders
• F5: start fullscreen presentation (leave with ESC)

Mouse controls:

• click: select text in window (TODO: move Emacs buffer with SyncTeX)
• control+click: pan page
• wheel: scroll page
• control+wheel: zoom