[Tex/LaTex] Displaying current chapter/section in your editor

editorsemacssectioning

I'm dreaming about a feature of a TeX editor (read: emacs, but for the sake of generality I'd be interested in answers about other editors, too) that displays the title of the current (read: the one that the cursor/point is in) chapter/section/subsection etc. (bonus points for displaying more than one level simultaneously, e.g. in the format "chapter:section" or whatever) somewhere (top of the screen/window/frame seems a natural choice for that). I read about the which-func-mode for emacs, but don't know (yet) how to make it work for LaTeX (and ConTeXt, for that matter).

Does anybody know how to do it in emacs, so that I don't reinvent the wheel? Are there other editors which such capabilities?

Best Answer

Sigur is right in his guess that TeXstudio does this. It has a structure panel, which shows basically a tree of the chapters, sections etc., and it will highlight the chapter where the cursor is placed. An example screenshot is below, note that the subsection where the cursor is placed has a grey background in the structure panel on the left.

If one doesn't like to keep the panel open all the time, one can create a keyboard shortcut to open/close it, under Options --> Configure TeXstudio --> Shortcuts. The relevant action is Menus --> View --> Structure.

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I use TeXworks for editing .dtx files: I'll explain how I set it up.

On Windows, the 'vanilla' TeXworks stores its settings in C:\Users\<user>\TeXworks\configuration (Windows 7)/ C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\TeXworks\configuration (Windows XP). There, you will find a file called syntax-patterns.txt, which is best edited using TeXworks itself (the line ending are *nix, so Notepad will mess the formatting up). I have added a section to that file which reads

[LaTeX DTX]

# comments
red        Y    \^\^A.*

# Guards
orange        N    %<(?:[A-Za-z0-9!\|\&]+|.)>
limegreen    N    %<\*(?:[A-Za-z0-9!\|\&]+|.)>
crimson        N    %</(?:[A-Za-z0-9!\|\&]+|.)>

# special characters
darkred        N    \^\^\^\^\^[0-9a-z]{5}
darkred        N    \^\^\^\^[0-9a-z]{4}
darkred        N    \^\^\^[0-9a-z]{3}
darkred        N    \^\^[0-9a-z]{2}
darkred        N    [$#^_{}&]
gray        N    ^%%.*
gray        N    ^%

# Macrocode
green        N    \\(?:begin|end)\{macrocode\}

# LaTeX environments
darkgreen    N    \\(?:begin|end)\s*\{[^}]*\}

# control sequences
blue        N    \\(?:[A-Za-z@:_]+|.)

Adding this, and restarting TeXworks, adds a new option to the Format -> Syntax Coloring menu. When I edit .dtx file, I use these highlighting settings.

If you are using TeXworks installed by TeX Live, the settings are in C:\Users\<user>\.texlive<year>\texmf-config\texworks\configuration (pick your year as appropriate).

For Mac users, the settings live in ~/Library/TeXworks/configuration, while on Linux they are in ~/TeXworks/configuration: other set up details remain the same.

An alternative to TeXworks on Windows is WinEdt. It has a pretty advanced 'DTX mode', available from the community support site. The colour scheme in my settings above is based on those from WinEdt's DTX mode: I used to use WinEdt before switching to TeXworks.

[Tex/LaTex] What Unicode Font is Best Suited for Math Symbols using Font-Locking under Emacs

As suggested by egreg, I will turn my comments into an answer to at least part of your question:

One would think that perhaps the Computer Modern fonts themselves might exist in some form (encoding + format) that would allow them to be used from within Emacs, and if so has anyone had success using them for this purpose?

You could use the CM-Unicode fonts, which are installable under Windows on OS level and therefore usable from all applications using the system fonts. I use these fonts in Inkscape, Word and PowerPoint.

Quoting from the CM-Unicode homepage:

Computer Modern Unicode fonts were converted from metafont sources using mftrace with autotrace backend and fontforge (former pfaedit). Their main purpose is to create free good quality fonts for use in X applications supporting many languages. Currently the fonts contain glyphs from Latin1 (Metafont ec, tc, vnr), Cyrillic (lh) and Greek (cbgreek when available) code sets and IPA extensions (from tipa).

You also ask about STIX fonts. These fonts are also available in otf format, so I would say it should be easy to install these fonts on system level.

Best Answer

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