Visual TEX: texlite

A prototype of a visual TEX is implemented by means of minor modifications of canonical TEX. The changes include the ability to start compilation from an arbitrary page, fast paragraph reformatting, and retaining the origin of visual elements. The new features provide direct editing of the document preview and correct markup of the source text. keywords: visual, TEX The need for visual TEX A good feature which TEX traditionally has lacked is visual editing, or the ability to typeset a document in its final (print preview) form. Though one can manage without visual editing, there are certain cases when it really helps, mainly when tuning the appearance of a document, especially for novice and occasional users. There are two ways to deal with this problem. The first one, implemented in lyx and SciWord, represents the source text in a form which logically resembles the resulting output. Although this way proved to be a good compromise, the logical preview is often quite far from the printed result. Besides, these tools use latex with special macros, so arbitrary TEX documents are beyond their scope. The other way is synchronously running a source text editor, TEX the compiler, and a viewer, so that changes made in the source editor are compiled and displayed in the viewer without explicit invocation of these tools in a command string or a menu. In textures, in addition, the cycle is closed by means of two corresponding pointers in the source editor and the viewer. The approach of Jonathan Fine, presented in these proceedings [2], can be related to this way. Its main problem lies in the need to compile a whole document to receive the visual response to an editing action. On slow computers, large documents, or complicated macros this compilation could cause at least a noticeable delay. How to TEX part of a document So, if even a single letter is changed, TEX needs to process the whole document from scratch. However, TEX already solved a similar problem by loading precompiled macros (so called ‘formats’). This way TEX saves the time required to compile standard