Live preview

Live preview

The page updates as you type, compiled by your own TeX installation. There is nothing to compile by hand, and nothing leaves your machine.

Where to find it
Toolbar
The Preview button Top right of the editor. It reads Live while the engine is running; click it to pause.
Setting
Terminal › Configure compile command… › Live mode
A page updating in the live preview while the source is edited

What you are looking at

The same PDF a manual compile would produce, not an approximation of it.

The compile command dialog with the Live mode toggle

Instant for most edits

Most keystrokes update the page immediately. A bigger change dims the page for a moment while it recompiles.

What renders

Live preview covers the constructs a paper actually uses, not just body text.

  • Math, footnotes, and tables inside floats.
  • Beamer slides.
  • TikZ and pgfplots figures.

Languages and fonts

Live preview is not limited to Latin scripts.

  • Right-to-left documents render right to left, with Arabic letters joined.
  • Greek, Cyrillic, and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text render correctly.

When the compile fails

A failed compile is reported in the Problems panel.

Live preview needs a TeX distribution installed. Editing works without one.