# LaTeX Editor¶

LaTeX is a sophisticated markup language and processor for typesetting documents. For a general introduction, read this LaTeX wiki book or any other resource.

## Getting started¶

To use the LaTeX editor, open or create a file whose name ends in .tex. By default, you should see an editor similar to the one in the screenshot below:

Building In general, you edit source code and compile it to a PDF document. Click the “Build” button (or hit shift+enter or alt+t) to build the tex file and produce a PDF. You can also check “Build on save: build LaTex file whenever it is saved to disk” in account preferences, and a build will be triggered whenever your file is saved to disk.

Interface In the initial screen layout, the source is on the left and a preview of the compiled PDF is on the right. Also, there are frames showing issues, warnings, errors, and the build log. You can close any of these panels by clicking the x in the upper right of the panel. You can also split them as much as you want, and change what is displayed in any panel. If you close all the panels, the default layout is restored.

• The PDF Preview shows the PDF document.
• You can easily position the preview by using the mouse to drag the preview around.
• There are buttons for zooming, and expanding to the vertical and horizontal height.
• Errors and Warnings
• The Errors and Warnings frame lists all compilation errors and warnings, and other issues. Click on the line number link to jump to the corresponding line in the input code on the left and the preview on the right. LaTeX may fail to compile (or only partially or in a wrong way) if there are many errors.
• The PDF - Native view (not shown by default) shows you an embedded view of the compiled PDF file, using your browsers native PDF view. This might be broken if your browser has problems rendering the file inline – use the “PDF Preview” view instead. Also, you can’t double click on the Native view to move back to jump to the corresponding tex.
• The Build Control view gives you more control over how the compilation process works:
• You can click in the build command line and edit it however you want, or select a different engine from the dropdown menu. By default, we compile using LatexMK, which manages temporary files and BibTeX.
• Click Clean to delete autogenerated temporary files.

## LaTeX 101¶

It is very easy to start with LaTeX. CoCalc guides your first document with a small default template. You start working between the \begin{document} ... \end{document} instructions. Everything before \begin{document} is called the “preamble” and contains the configuration for the document.

For example, remove the \maketitle instruction and replace it by

> Hello \textbf{CoCalc}! This is a formula: $\frac{1}{1+x^2}$.

After saving ([CTRL] + [s] or click the green Save button at upper left), the file will build, and you should see an updated PDF preview.

• New paragraphs: Single returns for new lines do not have any effect. Use them to keep new sentences in paragraphs at the beginning of a line for better overview. Two or more returns introduce a new paragraph.

### What to do if the preview does not update¶

Possible reasons:

1. Are there any errors in the “Issues” tab? LaTeX only compiles well if there are zero reported errors.
2. Long documents could take an extended period of time to complete. In the “Preview” tab, disable the preview and only enable it once to avoid piling up too much work on the back-end.
3. Similarly, computational-heavy “SageTeX” computations could lead to excessive compilation times. You can pre-compute results or split the document into smaller parts.

### How to deal with large documents across multiple source files?¶

The best way is to use the subfiles package as described here. There is an extended example demonstrating how this works in the CoCalc Library. Click (+)New and look for Library in the middle of the page, then under LaTeX templates select Multiple source files in CoCalc. The same example is also available at cloud-examples/latex/multiple-files.

### How to use PSTricks macros?¶

PSTricks is a set of macros for including PostScript drawings in a TeX document. The website has an extensive gallery of examples. The main thing to remember when using PSTricks is to set Engine in the CoCalc Build panel to XeLaTeX as in this small demo .tex file and resulting .pdf.

### Setup texmf in a project?¶

A CoCalc project is equivalent to a linux user account. Therefore, the texmf discovery mechanism works the same as on a local machine. By default, you should be able to put your own packages and styles into ~/texmf. Afterwards, you might have to run run texhash ~/texmf in a terminal or the little “Terminal command” textbox in “Files”.

Note: the ~ stands for the HOME directory, which is the root directory you see in the “Files”-listing. You can click the home icon to jump into the home directory. texmf is a subdirectory right there.

### Is there a way to turn off automatic build and PDF preview while I’m working on sub documents?¶

If you’re working on a main LaTeX document that has included tex files, you may want to turn off compilation of the individual subfiles. Here are some steps you can take:

• By default, building latex documents on saving is enabled. You can disable it under AccountPreferencesEditor settings by removing the check mark for Build on save: build LaTex file whenever it is saved to disk.
• You can also disable the build process by opening the “Build” dialog and entering echo in the line where the command is. That just does nothing when it tries to build.
• If you like, you could also structure your LaTeX in such a way that subdocuments also build via the CTAN subfiles package. You can find an example in the CoCalc Library. In a project, click on + New, and in the middle you will find the Library. Look under LaTeX templatesMultiple source files in CoCalc.

In general, multifile LaTeX editing is on our radar, but we haven’t got to that yet: CoCalc issue #904.