Using LaTeXiT to display math formulas

CRASHING AFTER AUTOMATIC UPDATE - REEVALUATING SOFTWARE CHOICES


I was screwed for awhile when Word for Mac didn't come with the Equation Editor installed. I evaluated a few options:

-- LaTEXiT Looks the best, but source for formulae are not stored in the document with the formula making it a bit more cumbersome. After trying alternatives, I was going to switch to LaTEXiT but (maybe yesterday or so) it said it was updating itself, and crashed - and since then it crashes each time I start it. So it's back to MathType with regular backups and sort-of ugly formatting for some things (like their ugly tall flattened rounded braces for vectors and matrices)

-- OpenOffice, but my thesis will grow too long to work without an outline view. I have considered copying from there and pasting into Office, but that's no better than LaTEXiT. OpenOffice is also a bit slow at times. And I really didn't want to work in two different applications. I've already got to have FireFox/Zotero active and running etc. and it's not convenient to have too much stuff competing for real estate on my tiny notebook display.

-- MathType is what I settled on for its pseudo-endorsement by MS using it in Word2008. Result: Some formulae have been turned to graphics and become uneditable, some have become partial graphics that are panned half-way outside their clipping box, and some have disappeared entirely (I suspect they're just panned outside the view of the box, which you can't resize or it just stretches the visible portion)

I wish someone would read Design Patterns and use it to make an object oriented word WYSIWYG-like processor with equations, etc. that use a subset of the same tags that tex does for its main content, but performs hierarchical re-formatting on objects on an as-needed basis rather than compiling like Tex does.

I think Snow Leopard broke this nice Services feature, I had it hot-keyed in Leopard but after the upgrade it's nowhere to be found, Tried re-enabling in LaTeXiT prefs, to no avail. Anyone else had this issue?

LaTeXit is fantastic for use with Keynote, the ability to drag equations into and out of Keynote with LaTeXit is awesome. For full latex documents, I use TeXShop, which is nice. Occasionally vim.

My favorite moment with LaTeXit was on April 1. I had to check the source code (it's open source, yay) after seeing what happened. I won't spoil what it is, but that date is definitely hard coded into LaTeXit.

TexShop, BibDesk, LaTeXiT are very useful for all your writing and PDF management. The fact that you can drag a formula from Latexit into another application and BACK into it is super useful if you need to tweak it further.

BibDesk is a great alternative to Yep and Papers because it stores all the aliases to your articles. Many new articles with proper DOIs within the PDF can be dragged into BibDesk and an entry with the alias will be created right away (this requires some tweaking though: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/bibdesk/index.php?title=BibDesk_Applescripts). Skim notes can also be read by BibDesk, which is great when you need to review what the heck that article was about without rereading the whole thing.

TexShop (via MacTex) is awesome as it installs everything you need for you writing pleasure. I even make 1 page notes on it because it looks so nice :)

My favorite LaTeX front end is InDesign.

Oh, you didn't know? Shucks.

LaTeX does indeed have loooooooong legs!

My favorite front end for LaTeX is TexMaker; I think it is also most Mac-like. TexShop is also a fine front end.

I use LaTeXiT to generate formulas to include in eps graphics that I create with a combination of Mathematica and Illustrator. Works great!

The two best features of LaTeX are

1. It is absolutely free!

2. It never, and I mean never, crashes, freezes or causes any other problems on the Mac.

Randy Scott
Santiago Canyon College

Am I the only one that uses TextMate?

A nice feature of LaTeXiT is that it "round-trips". E.g., if you copied a LaTeXiT equation in Keynote and later review the Keynote document to change the equation, you can drag the equation back into LaTeXiT and it will reproduce the TeX source for the equation — it's then trivial to edit as needed.

I just use Grapher and copy and paste my equations into programs from there. It's simple and built right in to OS X!

I always use Emacs to edit my LaTeX code, as well as almost all other text stuff and programming.