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

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 ?

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 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.)

As a non English first language person. and as a who one person thinking LaTeX is very useful language. I am encountering Font Matching issue problem very often when using latex. But there is very few environment or editor or solution which can handle this. I just wanted know the opinions. I am re asking because previous my posting is automatically hidden with message ("Post is awaiting moderator approval.")

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.

Hello!
Struggling to get texStudio and LiveTex to recognize the linebreaks in the text editors as full paragraphs without needing a full extra line break between them.
Example of what its doing: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1561540844891152524/1561554267926433892/image.png?ex=6ad6c63d&is=6ad574bd&hm=9af8e917ea21f7d997e40cbaf3ef0b4be34da6f948b355b391163f873bcb1aa4& https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1340775120209317959/1561563327522406490/image.png?ex=6ad6cead&is=6ad57d2d&hm=5ccd0ed19c613ad080e26e786d60edabbf3d3b8ca64f5f0d1706ab92a45d956a&

its like reddit text formatting rn, how do I not have to go through and manually add spacing to ~85k worth of words?

``` \usepackage{xcolor,pagecolor}

\IfFileExists{.darkmode}{\color[gray]{0.7}\newpagecolor{black}}{} ```

When it gets dark and the white background of my papers starts hurting my eyes, I just touch .darkmode and the next compilation generates a PDF with a black background and light gray text.

Some browsers and/or extensions can take care of this, but I mostly work in VS Code, so it's a neat little trick.

The if could be controlled by a LaTeX "variable" but I prefer having an external element I am sure I will not commit.

I built a VS Code PDF extension that supports LaTeX maths in comments and text boxes, which is handy when annotating research papers. It also supports highlighting and other PDF annotations.

Thought some people here might find it useful! Feedback is welcome.

Whats your favorite L<sup>A</sup>TₑX math font and least favorite L<sup>A</sup>TₑX math font?

Edit: The preview image on this post is wrong. It drops the second header row (↓ ↓ (M)). Thanks u/LupinoArts for catching it. The mistake was in the promo graphic, not in what the app outputs. Reddit won't let me swap the preview on an existing post, so here is the full code CatchTeX gives for that table:

\begin{tabular}{lccc}
\toprule
Method & Set A & Set B & Params \\
 & $\downarrow$ & $\downarrow$ & (M) \\
\midrule
Baseline & 4.21 & 7.85 & 11.2 \\
Ours ($\alpha = 0.5$) & \textbf{3.64} & \textbf{6.90} & 11.4 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}

Two other fixes: step 2 originally showed a single backslash (Reddit ate one, it should be \\), and the app now runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, not just Windows.

If you need to reproduce a table from a paper (related work, a replication, a comparison), retyping it is slow and error-prone. Here is a workflow that works with free tools:

1. Pull the text layer, not a screenshot. pdftotext -layout -f 5 -l 5 paper.pdf - (Poppler) prints page 5 with columns kept aligned. The numbers are exactly what the authors typed.
2. Turn columns into cells. Replace runs of 2+ spaces with & (regex \s{2,}) and end each line with \\. Check merged headers by hand.
3. Fix the characters that break pdfLaTeX. PDFs often give you U+2212 (−) instead of a hyphen-minus, and ligatures like fi/fl. Search-and-replace them, or you get "Unicode character not set up for use with LaTeX".
4. Use booktabs. \toprule, \midrule, \bottomrule, no vertical rules. For decimal alignment, siunitx S columns.
5. Compile the table on its own first in a minimal standalone or article file before dropping it into your thesis.

Disclosure: I made a desktop app, CatchTeX (Windows, Mac and Linux), that does steps 1–5 in one go: drag a box over the table and it gives you booktabs code, compiled with a built-in pdfLaTeX before you copy. It is offline and has a free tier of 10 snips a day. Happy to hear where it breaks. The manual steps above work fine without it.

Hi all. Recently, I created a LaTeX editor based on the Jetbrains platform, called LaTeX Pro. I also created an RST, AsciiDoc, Typst and MarkDown editor, and when one of my users switched from Typst to LaTeX, I got a bit frustrated with the way how the LaTeX works, and LaTeX Pro is the result.

However, I'm curious to hear what other people are using? Is Overleaf the goto solution, or do people prefer a more local solution? I'm curious to hear what features people really appreciate, so perhaps I can draw some inspiration from that. Thanks!

Update Okay, okay, this blew up quickly!!! Thanks for all the responses, you've given me already quite some tools to look into! Much appreciated to all who left a comment here!!!

Update 2: Thanks for all the responses! I went through the comments and put together a quick summary of the most frequently mentioned LaTeX editors.

These are approximate counts, and some people mentioned multiple editors. This isn't a scientific survey, just a snapshot of this discussion.

Hey everyone, hope you're doing well. Today I thought of something, what if there is tool convert beamer presentation to HTML presentation. You know we can't add animations to beamer. So if someone knows about this I will appreciate it.

I have just recently startet trying to get familiar with latex, however i do have a littele trouble trying to do the \ , as everytime i do shift+option+7 it makes a \frac{}{} appear, instead. any ideas as to why that is the case?

(i am on a apple laptop)

Thanks

I am writing a document in Overleaf. When I go to reference an equation using \eqref{}, I assumed that the auto-suggestion of labeled equations would only pull from labels that I created in my current .tex document. Instead, it is pulling suggestions from all .tex files inside of my project. Even though I do not input any other .tex files into my current file. Has anyone dealt with this, and is there a fix?

Another brief update for my hobby TeX engine series -- I'm about to have a period in which I have less time to work on this project for a spell, and wanted to get in one last update. This time: just like XeTeX and LuaTeX made working natively with OpenType fonts part of the engine level, I'm exploring what it would mean to do the same thing for OpenType math fonts.

In part because I had less time to plan this video out, I feel like my explanation of exactly what I'm doing at the engine level was shaggier than it should have been. To be clearer: XeTeX and LuaTeX already handle low-level OpenType Math table box-building, and expose primitives to teach the engine about unicode characters. However, they leave the heavy lifting of setting everything up to the unicode-math package (instantiating separate font families for text, script, and scriptscript sizes, assigning thousands of codepoints to map standard symbols and Greek letters, dealing with all of Unicode's historical exception tables (looking at you, Planck's constant!) and so on).

In NemaTeX, I've shifted all of that font-orchestration and alphabet-mapping machinery into the c++ code. When an OpenType math font is active, the engine can do things like treating \mathbf, \mathcal, or \mathbb as virtual math alphabets, translating the base characters directly to their target unicode codepoints.

To be honest, I know that for compatibility I will have to revisit some of the specific design decisions I made there. I somehow didn't know this before I was working on this part of my engine, but it turns out that the unicode-math package has a two-tiered semantic system: "symbols" (\symbf, \symit, etc) refer to glyphs in the OpenType math font, and "math" (\mathbf, etc) refer to glyphs in the corresponding text font files.

The way I implemented it for now probably is just a reflection of my old-fashioned mental model of LaTeX, in which by "\mathbf" I meant "\symbf" without knowing that that was the spelling. But that being said, I'm curious how other people think about the semantics here: should \mathbf pull from the math font or the text font?

Compare two versions of a LaTeX document and get a PDF highlighting what changed.
Try it out: https://redlatex.onrender.com
Feedback is welcome!

Hi everyone!

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I'm a bit confused about how to submit my paper.

I wrote my paper using Overleaf and used the Springer Nature template because I want to submit it to one of their journals. The journal's submission website says I need to upload a ZIP file containing the LaTeX source files. It gives the following instructions:

"LaTeX documents with figures and tables compressed into a .zip format. We will compile these into a PDF for peer review."

I'm using a Mac, and when I click Download ZIP on Overleaf, I seem to get a folder containing my .tex file and other project files. However, the journal's submission website doesn't let me upload a .tex file directly. It accepts PDFs, other document formats, and ZIP files.

My questions are:

• Am I supposed to compress the downloaded folder into a ZIP file myself?
• Should the ZIP file contain the entire Overleaf project, including the .tex file, bibliography, figures, and any other necessary files?
• Is there anything specific I need to do to make sure Springer Nature can compile the files correctly?

I'd really appreciate a step-by-step explanation or a tutorial, especially for macOS and Overleaf, as this is my first time submitting a LaTeX paper to a journal.

Thanks so much for your help!

Update: Thanks to everyone who has replied! I realize I should explain what I've built and why I'm trying to reach people in scientific publishing.

I've developed LEC, a native C/C++ TeX engine for live scientific-document editing and publishing.

What I'm looking for is a way to reach the right people at companies like Overleaf, Digital Science, Wiley, Springer Nature, Elsevier, or smaller companies developing scientific publishing technology.

I'm particularly interested in the engineers, software architects, R&D teams, and product developers who work on new authoring and publishing technologies.

I've spent a considerable amount of time building this engine, and I'd like to show it to someone who understands this field, might find it useful, and would be interested in taking a closer look.

I'm just not sure how an independent developer can reach the right people in these companies.

Here's what I've built and why I think it might interest them.

1. Live LaTeX editing at the character level

Imagine editing a LaTeX document directly in its rendered form, almost like Word, except it's the actual TeX engine producing what you see, without generating an intermediate PDF.

You can click inside a complicated equation, fraction, or matrix and edit individual characters directly. Even if something was generated by a macro defined elsewhere, the engine can take you back to the exact source that produced it.

This isn't paragraph-level or line-level synchronization between LaTeX source and a PDF preview. It's character-level correspondence maintained by the engine itself.

TikZ and PGFPlots can also update as you change expressions, almost like working with a graphing calculator.

Under the hood, the engine retains execution state and uses a dependency graph to reuse valid work between edits. It supports parallel processing and keeps the last successful rendered output visible while you're typing incomplete LaTeX.

It executes real LaTeX macros and CTAN packages, and I've built a package manager that searches for and installs packages from TeX Live.

2. LaTeX directly to Markdown, without going through PDF

This is the other major capability, particularly for publishers with large collections of scientific papers and textbooks.

Instead of reconstructing a document from PDF or separately interpreting raw LaTeX commands, LEC executes the original LaTeX, including its macros and packages, and produces structured Markdown from the resulting document.

Supported equations remain editable, references and numbering are retained, and figures are preserved as images.

I've tested the engine on many arXiv articles. A multi-page, two-column scientific paper can become a continuous, reflowable document, with its content arranged for reading on different screen sizes.

That Markdown can then be used to produce HTML or EPUB using existing publishing tools.

3. The engine itself is the product I'm developing

The editor in the video is a basic application I built to demonstrate the engine's capabilities.

My longer-term goal is to make the engine available for integration into other software, whether that's a scientific authoring platform, an IDE, a publishing system, or potentially an ebook reader.

I've also designed it with both open-source and proprietary commercial integration in mind.

Here are two videos showing the actual software:

• Live LaTeX editing: https://youtu.be/_sbWaia7AV8
• LaTeX to Markdown: https://youtu.be/LhMUg7xWD_0

Examples of scientific papers converted directly from LaTeX to Markdown and HTML

I've also published several conversion examples on my website, https://www.linneon.com. These are actual scientific papers processed by LEC, with mathematics, references, figures, and document structure carried into the resulting Markdown.

1. A posteriori error estimation for coarse or distorted meshes

41 source pages · 1,039 mathematical expressions

Read HTML · Download Markdown

2. A Refined Cometary Fluorescence Model for the ν₃ Vibrational Band of Cyanogen

20 source pages · 576 mathematical expressions

Read HTML · Download Markdown

3. Optimal transport distances to characterise electronic excitations

21 source pages · 179 mathematical expressions

Read HTML · Download Markdown

4. A scalable sample-based quantum diagonalization solver for general Pauli-sum Hamiltonians

10 source pages · 247 mathematical expressions

Read HTML · Download Markdown

So, back to why I originally posted here.

I'm trying to find the right people at companies developing scientific authoring and publishing technologies. Not general customer support or sales, but the engineers, R&D teams, or product developers who might be interested in taking a closer look at LEC.

If you work in this area, know someone who does, or have any suggestions on how to reach them, I'd really appreciate hearing from you.

Feel free to DM me or email me at [e@linneon.com](mailto:e@linneon.com).

And if you have technical questions about the engine, I'm happy to discuss those too.