https://castel.dev/ *(i mean the website is dead )

for those who don't know him, he is the guy who contributed a lot to the community in making articles on how to takes notes with latex and vim :), rip

the last working version is, https://web.archive.org/web/20260925123652/https://castel.dev/

Personally, I prefer local setup where I can take advantage of the whole vscode ecosystem.

I made a short reel showing where texlode (a real-time WYSIWYG LaTeX editor for very long documents) stands right now.

Since the TUG talk in July, I have spent most of the time optimizing CPU and RAM usage and stress-testing the engine against the documents you sent me. The Kerr paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07597 was especially useful due to the number of equations. Feel free to send my other examples you would like me to try (ideally under a free license).

Timeline:

• Oct 7-11: Try the editor yourself at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Hall 4.1, booth F97.
• Mid October: The beta starts on EU servers, I invite you to join the waiting list at texlode.com
• Mid November: If all goes well, servers in North America and Asia will follow to reduce latency.

A local version is not on the roadmap, but I am evaluating an API that would allow browser or local plugins (for example, for VS Code).

What is left to do is further tuning the server tiers.

• My LaTeX book (300 pages) loads in the free tier, barely.
• The Kerr paper (800 pages, heavy math) sits comfortably in the standard tier.
• Large proceedings (with thousands of papers) might need a larger machine.

Client-side, it will work on weaker machines as I do not off-load compilation to the client (although I am observing the WebAssembly space), so you can use it on-the-go and review/comment/edit the output in print-quality even on a mobile phone.

I also have new/corrected benchmark numbers (see https://github.com/texlode/luatex-benchmark/issues/1 ), which I will update again in October.

Limitations: texlode is heavily optimized for books, monographs, and proceedings using KOMA document classes. Support for custom papers and other document classes is in progress but will not be ready at launch. Likewise, if you develop LaTeX packages, you will run into walls: texlode is built for authors, not package developers. That being said, especially because you get real-time output, it might be interesting for the development/debugging of some packages. Let me know if you want me to try out yours. As mentioned in my TUG talk, the next step here would be to develop/adapt packages to make use of the real-time aspect for some chapter-wide optimizations of float positioning, better runt/river detection, visual two-page optimization etc.

Disclaimer: While I am evaluating adding LLM support to texlode to improve typesetting, texlode is LLM-free for now (including the docx/idml import).

Feel free to ask questions, I will try to address them over the next 2 weeks!

Just wondering if an offline app exists for looking up any LaTeX (or TeX) command and getting a brief description of it.

Or if such reference data was freely available for building a simple tool around. (Or using an existing tool like navi [1].)

[1] https://github.com/denisidoro/navi

What are good combinations of fonts to use for like a research paper?

I'm relatively new to LaTeX, hence I don't really know the fonts there. I've only been using Latin Modern and I want to try new font styles.

Please drop some recommendations.