WhizzyTeX and Active-dvi

WhizzyTeX and Active-DVI are a pair of utilities from INRIA for writing LaTeX files which work on their own, but have an interesting feature when used together.

WhizzyTeX is an Emacs minor mode for LaTeX (but not plain TeX), and Active-DVI (advi) is a .dvi file viewer (an alternative to xdvi) and a programmable presenter for LaTeX slides. The interesting feature is that when used together you get a what-you-see-is-what-you-get WYSIWYG display since the advi window changes as you type LaTeX in the emacs window, and if you press shift and left mouse button in the advi window the emacs cursor moves to the code which generated the text you pointed at.

To prepare emacs to use WhizzyTeX, edit your ~/.emacs file by adding the lines:

;;; whizzy-tex 
(autoload 'whizzytex-mode
  "whizzytex"
  "WhizzyTeX, a minor-mode WYSIWIG environment for LaTeX" t) 
(setq-default whizzy-viewers '(
			       ("-advi" "advi -html Start-Document")
			       ("-dvi" "xdvi")
			       ("-ps" "gv")
			       ))

then (assuming you are editing the file with emacs) select the item Byte-compile and Load from the Emacs-Lisp menu. This only needs to be done once.

To start using this mode on a LaTeX file loaded into emacs, type ESC x whizzytex-mode RET.

The whizzytex manual /usr/share/doc/whizzytex-1.2.1/whizzytex.html recommends that you use the emacs online help available through the whizzy help menu.