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+<head>
+<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label WYGexpts</title>
+</head><body>
+<h3>The TeX document preparation environment</h3>
+<p/><p/>&ldquo;<a href="FAQ-notWYSIWYG.html">Why TeX is not WYSIWYG</a>&rdquo;
+outlines the reasons (or excuses) for the huge disparity of user
+interface between &ldquo;typical&rdquo; TeX environments and commercial word
+processors.
+<p/>Nowadays, at last, there is a range of tools available that try either
+to bridge or to close the gap. One range modestly focuses on
+providing the user with a legible source document. At the other
+extreme we have <a href="http://www.texmacs.org"><i>TeXmacs</a></i>,
+a document processor using
+TeX&rsquo;s algorithms and fonts for both editor display and printing.
+<i>TeXmacs</i> does not use the TeX
+language itself (though among other formats, LaTeX may be exported
+and imported). A bit closer to LaTeX is
+<a href="http://www.lyx.org/">LyX</a>, which has its own
+editor display and file formats as well, but does its print output by
+exporting to LaTeX. The editor display merely resembles the
+printed output, but you have the possibility of entering arbitrary
+LaTeX code. If you use constructs that LyX does not
+understand, it will just display them as source text marked red, but
+will properly export them.
+<p/>Since a lot of work is needed to create an editor from scratch that
+actually is good at editing (as well as catering for TeX), it is
+perhaps no accident that several approaches have been implemented
+using the extensible <i>emacs</i> editor. The low end of the
+prettifying range is occupied by syntax highlighting: marking TeX
+tokens, comments and other stuff with special colours.
+Many free editors (including <i>emacs</i>) can cater for TeX in
+this way. Under Windows, one of the more popular editors with such
+support is the
+Shareware product <a href="http://www.winedt.com/"><i>winedt</a></i>.
+Continuing the range of
+tools prettifying your input, we have the <i>emacs</i> package
+<a href="http://x-symbol.sourceforge.net"><i>x-symbol</a></i>, which does
+the WYSIWYG part of its work by replacing single TeX tokens and
+accented letter sequences with appropriate-looking characters on the
+screen.
+<p/>A different type of tool focuses on making update and access to
+previews of the typeset document more immediate. A recent addition
+in several viewers, editors and TeX executables are so-called
+&lsquo;source specials&rsquo; for cross-navigation. When TeX compiles a
+document, it will upon request insert special markers for every input
+line into the typeset output. The markers are interpreted by the DVI
+previewer which can be made to let its display track the page
+corresponding to the editor input position, or to let the editor jump
+to a source line corresponding to a click in the preview window.
+<p/>An <i>emacs</i> package that combines this sort of editor movement
+tracking with automatic fast recompilations (through the use of dumped
+formats) is
+<a href="http://pauillac.inria.fr/whizzytex/"><i>WhizzyTeX</a></i>
+ which is best used with a previewer by the
+same author. A simpler package in a similar spirit is called
+<a href="http://www.activetex.org/"><i>InstantPreview</a></i> and makes
+use of a continuously running copy of TeX
+(under the moniker of <code>TeX daemon</code>) instead of dumping formats to
+achieve its speed.
+<p/>Another <i>emacs</i> package called
+<a href="http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net"><i>preview-latex</a></i>
+tries to solve
+the problem of visual correlation between source and previews in a
+more direct way: it uses a LaTeX package to chop the document source
+into interesting fragments (like figures, text or display math) which
+it runs through LaTeX and replaces the source text of those
+fragments with the corresponding rendered output images. Since it
+does not know about the structure of the images, at the actual cursor
+position the source text is displayed while editing rather than the
+preview. This approach is more or less a hybrid of the source
+prettifying and fast preview approaches since it works in the source
+buffer but uses actual previews rendered by LaTeX.
+<p/>A more ambitious contender is called TeXlite. This
+system is only available on request from its author;
+it continuously updates its screen with the help of a special version
+of TeX dumping its state in a compressed format at each page and
+using hooks into TeX&rsquo;s line breaking mechanism for reformatting
+paragraphs on the fly. That way, it can render the output from the
+edited TeX code with interactive speed on-screen, and it offers the
+possibility of editing directly in the preview window.
+<p/>That many of these systems occupy slightly different niches can be
+seen by comparing the range of the
+<i>emacs</i>-based solutions ranging from syntax highlighting to instant
+previewing: all of them can be activated at the same time without
+actually interfering in their respective tasks.
+<p/>The different approaches offer various choices differing in the
+immediacy of their response, the screen area they work on (source or
+separate window), degree of correspondence of the display to the final
+output, and the balance they strike between visual aid and visual
+distraction.
+<dl>
+<dt><tt><i>preview-latex</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/preview-latex/">support/preview-latex/</a>
+<dt><tt><i>texmacs</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/unix/TeXmacs/">systems/unix/TeXmacs/</a>
+</dl>
+<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=WYGexpts">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=WYGexpts</a>
+</body>