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Version 3_1 (June 24 2005) the Interactive Tex Editor

Description   iTe is an easy to use, interactive authoring tool for L^ATEX and TEX documents. With iTe, it is possible to select arbitrary display fragments such as figures, equations, labels, captions, etc. These fragments can then be freely moved, rotated and scaled. Existing tools are either awkward to use (for example cryptic L^ATEX extensions), or they produce results of poor quality (font of captions does not match L^ATEX font, for example). To the user, iTe is an easy to use and effective tool which is a lot of fun.

Example   Using iTe, it took my then five year old daughter only a few minutes to typeset the simple example to the right.

How does it work   The user actions (translation, scaling and rotation) are simultaneously recorded in the L^ATEX source file and displayed on the screen by an asynchronous ghostscript process. What you see on the screen is exactly what you get if the source is recompiled and printed.

How to use it   Because iTe is written in Emacs-lisp, it integrates nicely in the editing process. Just call it during a normal (X)Emacs session as many times as you want. Note however, that iTe is not a WYSIWYG front end for L^ATEX, and iTe does not change the way you use L^ATEX to typeset 95% of your text. But it will help you to manage the remaining 5% fast with a high quality result.

Platform  iTe should run on every Unix and MS Windows platform meeting the requirements.

(La)TeX related recources

• TUG, the TeX Users Group. TUG provides an organization for those who have an interest in systems for text typesetting and font design, and are users of TeX and Metafont.
• CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. CTAN is a set of fully-mirrored ftp sites providing the most complete, up-to-date TeX-related software possible.
• AUC TeX, an extensible package that supports writing and formatting TeX files for most variants of GNU Emacs. AUC TeX is a nice package, and I suggest using it in conjunction with iTe.
• teTeX, a complete TeX distribution for UNIX compatible systems. You will probably have teTeX installed on your system. Consider to get it otherwise.
• LyX, a WYSIWYM style document processor using LaTeX. iTe will not run under LyX, and LyX does not provide the functionality of iTe.