I've been having some issues with my local Texifier on MacOS and also have switched to Linux for my writing machine - so I set up Overleaf CE a bit clunkily to keep things consistent - and give to friends without walking everyone through the setup. I read a few days ago that people were looking for alternatives to Overleaf so I thought I should sort my system out. A few missing-package and font errors later, I ended up packaging Overleaf Community Edition with full TeX Live and a small launcher.

Here it is: https://github.com/vishvish/overleaf-personal on GitHub

It is for myself and what I do, so it's quite big, but it is, or should be, turnkey.

Prebuilt ARM64 and AMD64 images on GHR, so there’s no image build to sit through.

Full TeX Live, including XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX and font discovery - hence big.

Persistent local storage for projects, accounts and history.

This is community packaging around upstream Overleaf CE. I’m using it with OrbStack on Apple Silicon. AMD64 startup and compilation have been checked under emulation, as my Intel Winter Mac is currently under the knife at the local repair shop.

Hi! We develop a LaTeX app for Confluence, and we’d be really grateful if you’d share your experience. Totally fine if it’s just a one-liner.

If you write formulas in Confluence:

• How do you add them right now? A marketplace app, pasting images/screenshots, plain text, something else?
• If you use an app, what do you like most, and what annoys you about it?
• And if you don’t use an app, what’s the most annoying part of your current way?

We’re doing some research on where the current options shine and where they fall short. Thanks a lot!

I draft most of my maths in Obsidian (Markdown with $…$ and $$…$$) before anything goes into a real .tex file. What annoyed me was the small edits: turning an inline formula into a display one, wrapping a display in align and adding the & and \\ by hand, renaming aligned to split and then fixing the \end too, adding \left \right to a bracket that got too tall.

So I made a plugin that does those as commands:

• toggle inline $x$ ⇄ display $$x$$
• turn the maths under the cursor into align (it puts & before the first relation of each line and \\ between lines)
• rename an environment: you type the new name in \begin{} and the \end{} follows
• toggle \left( \right) on the nearest bracket, toggle align ⇄ align*, unwrap an environment

If you use Vim keys, it also adds text objects like vimtex's (dim deletes the inside of the maths, cie changes the inside of an environment, ciB the inside of braces), but the commands work without Vim.

The video shows it running. It's free and open source (MIT): https://github.com/confuserdotcom/obsidian-latex-objects

What other LaTeX edits do you find yourself doing by hand over and over? I'd like to add the ones that come up most.

Hello.

I'm working on a template for my calendar/planner.

The calendar is printed on A4, which is cut in the middle and bound as an A6 booklet.

At the moment I'm creating the layout with nested minipages.

A minipage for each A6 page, inside those a minipage for each day. But this structure is not easy to work with. In my mind I'm picturing someting like a box for each day that I'm filling with text.

Is there a more elegant way to do this that I'm not aware of?

I was thinking about a tabular environment, but the content of each cell has linebreaks and the cells should have a fixed size. A tabular environment seems like the wrong tool for the job.

Is there maybe a way to make a box that I'm them positioning and styling with Tikz or something like that?

\documentclass[../kalender.tex]{subfiles}
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.5\textheight]{0.5\textwidth}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.12\textheight]{\textwidth}
Montag \hrulefill \space Month1 \hspace{5mm} \\
        {\Huge Num0} \hfill {\footnotesize Holiday0} \hspace{10mm}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.12\textheight]{\textwidth}
Dienstag \hrulefill \hspace{10mm}\\
        {\Huge Num1} \hfill {\footnotesize Holiday1} \hspace{10mm}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.12\textheight]{\textwidth}
Mittwoch \hrulefill \hspace{10mm}\\
        {\Huge Num2} \hfill {\footnotesize Holiday2} \hspace{10mm}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.12\textheight]{\textwidth}
  Donnerstag \hrulefill \space {\footnotesize PagenumberU} \hspace{10mm}\\
        {\Huge Num3} \hfill {\footnotesize Holiday3} \hspace{10mm} \\
\end{minipage}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.5\textheight]{0.5\textwidth}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.12\textheight]{\textwidth}
\begin{flushright}
\hspace{5mm} KW-1 \hrulefill \space Freitag\\
        \hspace{5mm} {\footnotesize Holiday4} \hfill  {\Huge Num4}
\end{flushright}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.12\textheight]{\textwidth}
\begin{flushright}
\hspace{5mm}\hrulefill \space Samstag  \\
        \hspace{5mm} {\footnotesize Holiday5} \hfill {\Huge Num5}
\end{flushright}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.12\textheight]{\textwidth}
\begin{flushright}
\hspace{5mm}\hrulefill \space Sonnntag\\
        \hspace{5mm} {\footnotesize Holiday6} \hfill {\Huge Num6}
\end{flushright}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[t][0.12\textheight]{\textwidth}
  \hspace{5mm} {\footnotesize PagenumberE} \space \hrulefill \phantom{I}\\
%habit0\begin{tabular}{cc@{\hskip.08cm}c@{\hskip.08cm}c@{\hskip.08cm}c@{\hskip.08cm}c@{\hskip.08cm}c@{\hskip.08cm}c}
%habit0\hspace*{7mm} & M           & D           & M           & D           & F           & S           & S            \\
%habit0              & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$  \\
%habit1              & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$  \\
%habit2              & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$  \\
%habit3              & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$  \\
%habit4              & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ & $\square$ 
%habit0\end{tabular}
\end{minipage}
\end{minipage}

\end{document}

Hi all,

I'm in the humanities and relatively new to writing with latex. On word, I like to sort my bibliographies into 3 sections: archival sources, primary sources in edition, and secondary sources. The first part I'll format manually, but I'd like to know if there's an easy way to split my bibliography into two different sections using Biblatex with biber? Currently I have both the edited primary sources and the secondaries in the same .bib file, but I can spit them up pretty easily!

I've been working on modernizing TikzEdt and wanted to share a Windows preview and get some feedback. It builds on the original open-source project rather than starting from scratch.

The idea is to keep the LaTeX source editable while making figures easier to build and adjust visually.

Features include:

• TikZ visual editing, snapping, control points, and TeX-rendered previews.
• Syntax highlighting, completion, folding, find/replace, and diagnostics.
• pdfLaTeX, LuaLaTeX, and XeLaTeX support.
• A Chemfig molecule editor with rings, stereochemical bonds, and lone pairs.
• An experimental PST-Labo editor for laboratory apparatus and liquid layers.
• Categorized snippets and SVG/PDF/image export.

Source code · Windows downloads

It's GPL-3.0 and still a development preview. .NET is bundled, but TeX and the PDF utilities must be installed separately. The downloads are unsigned, and visual editing doesn't support arbitrary TeX macros yet.

I'd especially appreciate feedback from people who used the original TikzEdt, along with examples that don't render or round-trip correctly.

What would make this useful in your LaTeX workflow?

Most other posts I've seen with above title have recommendations to do locally i.e. with vim/vs-code/tex-live or something like that. Are there any decent online alternatives like Prism? They're shutting down soon so I'm needing to migrate.

EDIT: A lot of comments are mentioning to download some form of TeX editor. I'm asking for online alternatives to Overleaf, completely compiled + hosted + viewable online.

Hello everyone ,
I wanted to share with you a desktop editor I’ve been working on called scribe . Scribe supports latex editing and it’s fully configurable to each users needs (theme key bindings fonts everything ). It’s also written in rust and is cross platform . It supports direct import from overleaf collaborative work through git and git history all for free . The one thing this makes it stand out in my opinion it that it has built in Python support so that diagrams etc can update live inside papers and also table and equation editors . It also supports note taking and live just in time latex rendering . The compile times are also very fast .

It is free for everyone forever and releasing very soon.

Check it out here : https://scribe.georgekiritsis.com

Every feedback is greatly appreciated

Some of you might have seen my last post about installing the "Hershey Old English" metafont. I got that sorted, and even got the cover of the pamphlet looking pretty spot-on. Now I'm working on the second page, with a small text block that took me longer than it should have to get properly oriented and aligned on the page. The only problem I have is that the text uses a lettrine, and the "Y" from Hershey Old English doesn't match my original document.

Now, this isn't an important document, most folks won't see the original, Nicolas Cage won't be trying to steal it any time soon, but I'll know. And it's a great learning opportunity!

So I took a picture of the Y with my phone, converted it to an SVG and PNG (I did the same with the little clover ornaments and a few other images in the pamphlet.) So now, is there a way replace the Hershey Old English "Y" with the one from the original source? Ditch the lettrine and use \includegraphics, then try to get the alignment back to where it should be?

Thank you in advance!

UPDATE: Thanks to u/jellybrick87 showing me "Engravers' Old English," I found a much better match for my needs with a bold variant of the font, and it looks perfect! I wish I could add a new photo for the before/after, but I don't see where that's possible.

Now I have to pull out the rulers and protractors to get my alignment perfect, but this is one less thing to worry about.

This is a great little resource for LaTeX users!

Made a small tool because I got burned by fake references. If an LLM writes or edits your .bib (or you paste DOIs from memory), you can end up with a DOI that doesn't exist, or one that belongs to a totally different paper. Also retracted papers, which you don't notice.

The name is because it started as a plugin for OpenCode (terminal AI coding agent), where it warns the agent right when it writes a fake citation. But the command above works without any of that.

It only checks that the paper exists and the title matches, not that it supports what you wrote.

Thanks for any feedback, and if it flags a DOI that is actually fine, tell me which one. I only tested it on my own stuff so weird .bib files might break it ;)

Repo: https://github.com/Xtardy/opencode-citecheck

Hello, everybody. I've posted a few examples of my very long-running project the Platonic Music Engine here before demonstrating my use of LaTeX to algorithmically recreate various artifacts of human culture like art, poetry and so on. Today's is by far the most elaborate and also the most TeX-like of all of them. It is called the Infinite Library.

The inspiration comes the terrific short story Library of Babel by Jorge Borges. In it is a library that contains every book that could ever be written. Each book is a random collection of letters. Think infinite monkeys typing at infinite typewriters.

A more proximate inspiration comes from this online realization of the short story that comes with a really interesting twist.

My version takes advantage of some of TeX/LaTeX's capabilities by making the resulting texts look more like real books. My software randomly adds various features like chapters, epigraphs, poetry, indices and so on. The books are still random nonsense but they look more like actual books than what Borges indicated.

The software has four methods of generation:

• Random letters: Borges stated that each book is made up of a random collection of 22 letters. We don't know which 22 letters. Some scholarship says it was the 26 letters of the English alphabet minus the letters "k", "q", "w" and "x". Other scholars think he meant the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (Borges was into Jewish mysticism). I include both possibilities and add a third that uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet. The one linked here uses the Hebrew alphabet and is right-to-left (in appearance -- it is still just random letters).

• Random words: This one is just words taken at random. Punctuation, paragraphs, chapters, etc, are determined at random.

• Stochastic unbounded recursive generative grammar: This is my favorite. In this one a subject and verb are chosen at random. Then, randomly, other parts of speech are added like adjectives, possessives, prepositional phrases, adverbs, and so on. And then randomly more nouns and/or verbs are added. The process is recursive which, in linguistic terms, means, basically, stringing together parts of speech. So you might have a phrase like "The dog". Adding one adjective you get, "The big dog". Recursion takes place when you string more adjectives together that modify the same noun like "The big red dog" or "The big red smelly ugly tall confused flabbergasted dog". The odds that any part of speech will recurse are small but sometimes you get some pretty crazy sentences. Ideally the resulting sentences make sense syntactically but the grammar often fails (eg, no subject-verb agreement is forced) and the sentences are still nonsense.

• Random sentences from public domain books: Here we take sentences at random from randomly selected books in the public domain.

The last two are interesting because they also include "styles". That is, randomly, a book will be about a certain domain. The generative book above is a poetry book meaning it has randomly generated poetry. Some use the verse environment (using indentation) and the others use shapepar. It also just happens to have some "ancient fonts" in it. This happened randomly and is not part of the poetry style.

The random sentence book uses the cartography style and has randomly generated maps in a couple of different styles. Other styles include music, math, linguistics and many more.

And then we have two books that are demos:

• Paratextual demo: This one has things like a half-title page, preface, index, glossary, epigraphs, drop caps and so on.

• Graphical demo: Here we have a frontispiece, hand-drawn annotations, charts, graphs, sheet music snippets, a bookmark, a book ribbon and many more graphical items. It also includes two "inserted" documents one being a map of where you and your selected book are and the other is one of 10 possible (so far) lore documents. This one is a short story written by one of the many librarians who live in the Infinite Library.

I had to do things like work out the physical layout of the library which is documented in some of the lore. One thing that happens is that each of the methods listed above exists in its own spatial dimension within the library. The random letter books are in the first dimension meaning all the books are either north or south of your starting point. Words and the generative grammar are the second (East and West) and third (Up and Down) dimensions respectively. The random sentence books exist in the fourth dimension (Ana and Kata). The title page of each book tells you where exactly your book is located.

Finally, the dedication at the top of the very first page of each document is what determines all the data in the book. A hash is taken of the dedication which becomes the seed for a prng included in the software. This means that it feels like there is a specific book for each different dedication.

Thanks for reading all of this and if anyone has any questions or comments please share! And if you have ideas for other features to add to the books let me know. I have to be careful because I'm not much of a programmer and things have to be pretty simple for me to do.

Also finally, I've been working on the larger project for around 15 years. So for most of that no AI was used. These days I use a little AI to help create the algorithms for some of the TikZ stuff. I have to fix all of it to make it fit my overall project but given there are things I just don't know how to do (like fractal trees), AI is helpful for that. Of the 40+k lines of code in the project, maybe 200 lines are directly from AI. I hope that's not too off-putting.

And the title of the post should be: Creating an Infinite Library (from Borges's "Library of Babel") using LuaLaTeX

Hi r/LaTeX,

I’ve been working on TeXline, a free, open-source Windows LaTeX editor built on TeXworks. I wanted the quiet writing space I like in Typora, while keeping ordinary .tex files and local compilation.

In focus mode, you can work on one section with the surrounding interface out of the way.

Read without losing your place. Move between source and PDF, keep a passage or equation beside your draft, and follow references before returning to where you were writing.

Work with Beamer. Browse and reorder frames, set progressive reveals, and expand the slide preview while keeping the frame list visible.

You can also edit figures, tables and formula structures visually, search your bibliography, and keep versions of a passage before rewriting it. Saved sessions bring back your section, selection, pinned reading and PDF position.

TeXline 1.0 runs on Windows 10/11 x64 and uses your own TeX Live or MiKTeX installation. No account is needed. There’s an installer and a portable ZIP, with English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese interfaces.

Website and download

GitHub · source and issues

If you try it, I’d love to hear how it fits into your usual writing. What feels awkward or gets in the way? If you find a bug, a small example would help me reproduce it. Thank you for your support!

I'm trying to recreate an old pamphlet from 1907 for my church. Everything else should be fairly easy, but I'm trying to match this font that's used on the cover and a few places inside. "Gothic" (yfonts package, \textgoth) is pretty close, but looking at samples "Hershey Old English" seems to be an almost perfect match. It's not included on any Latex installation, and I can't find instructions to install it. Can it be done?

Thank you in advance!

EDIT TO ADD: I know where to download it from. I don't know how to install it. It's a metafont (hge.mf), and looking in the fonts folder of my install gives me no clue where it should go, or if I need to do anything beyond drag-and-drop to get it there.

Comment
by u/Every_Buy_720 from discussion
in LaTeX

Although there are many great LaTeX ebook templates available on Github, many do not provide an example of the design element that can be included in such a project. My aim is to provide an example.

This is an excerpt of a LaTeX designed pdf ebook project (in progress) with title, halfpage, copyright, table of contents, parts, chapters, pages incl roman and arabic numerals, and more; Modified from the excellent Lagrand Orange book textbook which can be found over on Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/the-legrand-orange-book-template-english/jtctyfmnpppc

To see the sample ebook: https://github.com/taebo26/ebook

I do have the LaTeX source code if you are interested in using this modified template to further your ebook project and add your own mods. If you are interested in writing a textbook, I suggest using the original template!

Hi everyone, I made a quick TikZ editor about 9 months ago to help me draw free body diagrams. Recently I have had some time to revisit this idea.

I will start by explaining why I created a new TikZ editor instead of contributing to an existing one:

• This TikZ editor uses the real TeX engine. As a result, what it renders is what TeX will render. This allows the editor to display and edit diagrams that no other TikZ editor will ever be able to.

A few things it currently supports:

• Graphs (bar, plots, etc.)
• Circuit TikZ
• 3D solids
• The editor will display (almost) every TikZ diagram, although you might not be able to edit ones that are very complicated.

Link: https://draw.texpile.com/ (Please note that this is the first public release and there might be bugs)

If you are interested in other Texpile projects (such as the visual LaTeX editor), you can check them out on the main page.

I guys what is better between vs code and jetbrains suite to produce scientific articles in LaTeX or analyze data for scientific purposes ?

Hi r/LaTeX, I’m the developer of CatchTeX. I built it after retyping one too many tables from papers by hand.

45-second demo (my own paper): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nckj1vkV4Yk

You drag a box over a table, equation, plot or diagram, and it writes the LaTeX: booktabs for tables, amsmath for equations, pgfplots for plots, TikZ for block diagrams. For PDFs it reads the characters from the file’s text layer instead of OCR, so the numbers come out exact. Every result is compiled before you copy it, and cells it’s unsure about are highlighted instead of being silently wrong.

It runs offline on your own computer, so your unpublished papers aren’t uploaded anywhere. Free tier: 10 snips a day.

What I’d really like to hear is where it fails: odd table layouts, multi-row headers, long aligned equations, anything. Happy to answer questions.

catchtex.com

(Mods: happy to remove if this counts as self-promotion.)

Hi everyone!

I created this webpage: https://mh-pedro.github.io/lousa-tex/

It’s similar to Google Slides, but with LaTeX integration.

My biggest problem with LaTeX is that I find creating presentations with it complicated and not very user-friendly. On the other hand, Google Slides and PowerPoint are easy and intuitive to use.

However, whenever I want to write an equation in Google Slides, I have to insert an image or use an extension that converts LaTeX code into an image. The problem is that once the equation is inserted as an image, I can’t easily edit it again.

So, I used Claude to help me create something similar to Google Slides, but with support for LaTeX and TikZ.

If you like the idea, feel free to check out the link, give it a try, and share your feedback!

P.S. I’m not a programmer, just someone who wanted to find a solution to this problem.

Wanted to use Visual Studio Code (1.142, oct 2026) with LaTeX Workshop. Have installed MacTex with homebrew already and the latex commands runs in terminal with no issues, however the plugin fails with recipe terminated with fatal error: spawn latexmk ENOENT. with the following LOG:

[16:33:06.597][Build][Step] Recipe step 1 The command is latexmk:["-synctex=1","-interaction=nonstopmode","-file-line-error","-pdf","%WS1%/4-Materials-phases"].
[16:33:06.597][Build][Step] env: undefined
[16:33:06.597][Build][Step] root: %WS1%/4-Materials-phases.tex
[16:33:06.598][Build][Step] cwd: %WS1%
[16:33:06.613][Build][Step] LaTeX build process spawned with PID undefined.
[16:33:06.615][Build][Step] LaTeX fatal error on PID undefined. Error: spawn latexmk ENOENT
[16:33:06.619]Error: spawn latexmk ENOENT
    at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:287:19)
    at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:525:16)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:90:21)
[16:33:06.619][Build][Step] Does the executable exist? $PATH: /opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/System/Cryptexes/App/usr/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/local/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/appleinternal/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin, $Path: undefined, $SHELL: /bin/zsh
[16:33:06.619][Build][Step]

Gemini suggesting amending the settings.json of VSC which doesn't work. In a separate stack overflow i found, it was suggested that the plugin is unable to recognise newer OS and hence unable to locate the correct path for latexmk. The solution they provided didn't work for me (to use sudo cpan File::HomeDir).

Would appreciate some help in this. Not super familiar with terminal commands so couldn't resolve this myself. thanks. context being im an engineering student who has been using overleaf for a few months for reports and note-taking, and now wants to move to editing files locally on a Mac (Sequoia 15.8.1).

I write and supervise long documents (theses, papers), and I kept wanting an editor that understood the *project*, not just the file I had open. Eventually I'd had enough, so I built one as a VS Code extension: **LaTeX Desk**.

It runs on your own machine with your own TeX install, so it works offline, your files stay local, and there are no compile time limits.

**What it does**

- Toolbar with Compile, Build & View, log, and jump lists for parts and labels, plus a side panel for formatting, equations and symbols

- **Bib Manager**: a table of your .bib entries with a health check (duplicates, missing fields) and a "fix all safe issues" button

- **Table wizard**, citation search, and project-wide rename for labels, cite keys and commands (with a preview before anything changes)

- **History**: snapshots of your project with diff, restore, and a latexdiff PDF of what changed

- **Export for submission**: arXiv or journal presets that collect only the files you actually use, then check the export compiles on its own

- Click in the PDF to jump to the source and back (SyncTeX)

**How I tested it**

My own 254 page thesis (17 files, 355 figures, 217 references), in a Linux VM on my MacBook Air M5: clean build in under a minute with 0 errors, a rebuild with nothing changed in 0.1 s, and a single chapter build about 7× faster than the full one. Spell checking the whole thesis takes under 0.2 s.

**What it doesn't do yet**

A visual editor, Zotero integration, grammar checking, multiple languages in the spell checker, and a template library like Overleaf's (that one needs serious effort). There's also a "fast preview" mode, but it's experimental and off by default. WIP!

**Get it here:** https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=esquaredSystems.latexdesk

I'm the author, and I built it through my small software company. I'd really value honest feedback, especially from anyone working on a thesis right now. What's the most annoying part of your current setup?

PS: It's free, and it'll stay free. No WinRAR style "trial" either, though I respect the legend.