This is the first article in a new series of articles about useful software for research such as LateX editors, reference managers and note-taking applications.
Feel free to comment the posts and to present other software you use yourself!
There is a comprehensive table which compares many LateX editors on Wikipedia, but I will talk more about my personal experience of using TeXworks.
TeXworks is inspired by another editor, TeXShop. I personally like the uncluttered environment that it offers. TeXShop is shipped with the main LateX distributions such as TeX Live and MiKTeX. It is multiplatform so that once you get used to it (which doesn’t require much time) you’ll be comfortable on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
TeXworks: the LateX editor and the PDF viewer side-by-side
One of the best things about TeXworks is its integrated PDF reader. On Windows, for example, many LateX editors rely on YAP for viewing DVI files. Just as a reminder, PDF files are usually what you would like to get (although IEEE requires you to upload PS files) and there are mainly two ways to get PDFs when using LateX: either you run latex + dvips + ps2pdf or you run pdflatex. Most of LateX editors on Windows use by default the first solution, and actually by default stop after the latex step, thus giving out a DVI file, which you can then preview with YAP. I think everybody has experienced frustrating glitches or lags in scrolling when using YAP. TeXworks, on the other hand, has chosen to be PDF centered, and thus gives out a PDF file by default. The PDF reader is integrated while other editors usually rely on an external PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. The nice thing about having an integrated PDF reader is that you don’t have to close your PDF file before running LateX. Indeed, if you view your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat and make some changes in the LateX source file, you need to close the PDF file before running LateX. Otherwise, having the file opened in Adobe Acrobat will prevent any other program, and in particular your LateX editor, from writing in the file (Edit: although apparently some LateX editors automatically control your PDF reader to close it, run LateX and open it again, more on that in another post). Nothing like that to worry about with TeXworks, and this is really a time saver.
The PDF reader integrates forward and reverse search so you can control-click (apple-click on Mac) somewhere in the source file and that’ll take you to the corresponding line of the PDF file, and vice versa.
Some tips and tricks
Completion
Another handy feature is that you can define your own completions so that if you type, for example, bfig and TAB, TeXworks will automatically replace bfig with a whole figure environment:
\begin{figure}
\end{figure}
It is easy to define your own completions, or to modify the existing ones. To do so, go to the Help menu and click on Settings and resources. A window appears with two links. Click on the second link Resources. This will take you to a folder. Open the completion folder. This folder contains text files which define the completions. If you want to add your own completion, open, for example, tw-latex.txt in a text editor. Then follow the instruction in the manual (Help menu ->/A short manual for TeXworks/ -> Section A.3 Roots for completion). See also the wiki.
Easy configuration of run modes
If you are just interested in getting a PDF out of your LateX code, the most straightforward way is probably the default use of pdflatex. It is, however, possible to run latex + dvips + ps2pdf if you wish (and you probably do, for example when you send a publication to IEEE). The procedure is well explained in TeXWorks’ wiki.
Templates
If you start writing a lot of LateX documents, you’ll probably want to have default templates for articles, presentations, …
In these templates you define which packages you would like to load, which commands you would like to be defined and so on, so that you can start off writing a new LateX document comfortably with everything already set up.
So you can just create your template (that is a LateX source file with everything – preambles, packages, … – but the main content) and save it in the folder templates in your Resources folder (already discussed above).
You might need to create the folder templates if it doesn’t already exist.
Then you can create a new document from this template by clicking on File -> New from Template….
