SwiftLaTeX
Elliott Wen, Gerald Weber · 2018
The text processing tool LATEX has prevailed as a standard in many fields of exact sciences; it is evident that LATEX is likely to be here to stay. From that perspective, it is important to explore what are the best possible ways to support the author in efficiently editing documents. There have been several approaches that provide graphical editing support for LATEX. We argue that a true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach is a justified requirement for future systems and we present here the first cloud-based true WYSIWYG editor. This allows the author to edit the document in its print form directly in a web-based PDF viewer. Building such a system creates unique challenges compared to existing approaches. We identify these challenges and name workable solutions. We also provide a usability evaluation of the new system. In short our finding is that editing LATEX directly in the PDF view is possible for a wide range of edits and valuable for many major user groups and use cases; hence it is a fair requirement for future top-of-the-line LATEX editors.