Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX [LWN.net]

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 11:21 UTC (Fri) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450)
In reply to: Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX by smitty_one_each
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

Any particular reason? Using Overleaf is a distinctly worse experience than using a locally installed LaTeX with your favorite editor, Git, Rsync, etc. Although not as convenient for this as Typst, LaTeX can be set up to provide a live preview (but it will lag behind “live” when your document swells, as LaTeX lacks Typst’s incremental compilation).

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 13:17 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Lyx has very good inline live preview support for Math. It's just 'compiling' the math snippet itself (with whatever environments/packages the doc is using) so it's near instant.

I'm a big fan of Lyx as a great accessible and fairly user-friendly UI for writing documents to eventually typeset with LaTeX. I've used it for my own dissertation and it made writing so much easier. It's also customisable. I ended up making a few of my own definitions for things, with their own menu entries - which was just a matter of adding some UI definition files.

My father went to uni after retirement and (eventually) got a masters. He used to have endless issues with his masters dissertation in MS Word, with the format going screw and *especially* the required citations being very hard to manage and constantly getting messed up. I was constantly having to go over to him to try help him with his MS Word processing issues. In the end, I switched him over to Lyx. Showed him how to make chapters, sections and sub-sections, and insert citations. Told him just to write, and that the formatting would largely take care of itself. I helped with proofing at the end and help with inserting figures and illustrations, but it saved *both of us* a lot of hair-pulling and time.

My dad generally does not get on with computers. He gets very frustrated with complex programmes, with states affecting things he can't see/understand. He became a big of fan Lyx however, for the way it just let him write and generally staying out of the way, while keeping track of all the citations and layout for him, and producing a beautiful doc at the end thanks to LaTeX.

Lyx is a _great_ bit of software!

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 27, 2025 11:19 UTC (Mon) by quietbritishjim (subscriber, #114117) [Link] (2 responses)

Another vote for LyX. As you say, the live preview of equations are very good. It feels essentially like you're just editing the PDF directly.

For that reason, I honestly think LyX is good even for advanced LaTeX users, despite often being pitched (dismissively) at beginners. It has a few "escape hatches" to raw LaTeX for anything not natively supported by LaTeX. I started using LyX after a decade use LaTeX and found it was much faster write in (by a factor of 3 in the one course I half-wrote in LaTeX then re-wrote in LyX) and unbeatable for editing an almost complete document (like my PhD thesis!). It does have potential for a bit of a competency gap though, where you might struggle if you've only ever used LyX then need an advanced LaTeX feature having not learnt the basics.

Perhaps if Typst really takes off then someone will make a LyX-like editor for it. (Maybe even me, one day!)

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 28, 2025 10:43 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

> I honestly think LyX is good even for advanced LaTeX users

Yes, it's excellent even if you're an advanced LaTeX user. Lyx will always let you "bug out" to the "Evil Red Text" (ERT) box and just write LaTeX if you want. I did a dissertation in Lyx that had a good bit of custom LaTeX macros, to use in math boxes, and other stuff. Indeed, you can easily *extend Lyx itself* and add support for your own macros in the menu system with just a small little text definition file - so even my own macros had Lyx support. ;)

It's an amazing tool Lyx.

There is extensive documentation, from a tutorial to a reference. Which is of course written in Lyx, so you can see exactly how it's done things. :) I.e., there is both a description of how to do something and there is the thing itself in Lyx, in the doc. ;)

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 28, 2025 11:17 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Oh, another great feature of Lyx, which makes it such a _huge_ time-saver for writing LaTeX no matter how advanced you are:

You can include all kinds of graphics into your document, and Lyx knows to auto-convert many many formats into something LaTeX can use, if it isn't already such a format. If there's a format it doesn't know, you can just add your own auto-conversion command into the settings. So I was able to just insert Dia diagrammes into my Lyx document, and *Lyx would just convert it to SVG and be able to display my diagramme in the screen*.

If writing raw latex you have to remember to do this all yourself, whether that's manual and remembering to update your SVGs whenever you update a source diagramme file; or writing a makefile.

Also, Lyx makes the "tweak image size-specification relative to page/column/box, and tweak placement, compile, check, adjust" cycle so much faster.

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 27, 2025 19:46 UTC (Sat) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

Using overleaf has a unique advantage when you have a group of collaborators that use different OSs and have installed LaTeX using different approaches (e.g. one on Windows with MikTeX, another one on Linux with TeXLive, another one on Linux with distribution provided packages). It gives you a platforms that can be used as a reference: if the doc compiles fine there and it does not compile fine for a subset of the collaborators, it is easy to convince them that the issue is on their side.

A pain point is that the free tier is insufficient even for the simplest document with the LuaLaTeX engine.