TeXyon Live Preview
A live preview for LaTeX documents that updates as you type, without saving
and without a separate PDF viewer. A resident TeXyon engine recompiles only
what your edit touched, so pages refresh in a fraction of a normal compile.
Getting started
- Open a saved
.tex file.
- Run TeXyon: Start Live Preview from the command palette.
The first start downloads the TeX support files it needs and builds the LaTeX
format, which takes a minute or so. Later starts reuse that cache.
The extension ships with its own TeXyon engine for Linux (x64), macOS (Apple
silicon) and Windows (x64). No TeX distribution is required.
Features
- Live preview of the active document and of included child files, using
their unsaved buffer contents.
- Forward search: TeXyon: Show Cursor in Live Preview scrolls to and
highlights the box for the current source line.
- Inverse search: Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on macOS) a spot in the preview
to jump to its source line.
- TeXyon: Cancel In-Flight Preview abandons a long compile, and
TeXyon: Stop Live Preview shuts the engine down.
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
Description |
texyon.executable |
empty |
A TeXyon binary to use instead of the bundled one. |
texyon.format |
latex |
The XeTeX format to preview with. |
Building from source
To use your own engine build, compile it with the preview-mupdf feature
and point texyon.executable at it. On Linux and macOS:
tools/mupdf/build.sh
TEXYON_MUPDF_DIR="$PWD/tools/mupdf/vendor/mupdf" \
cargo build --release -p texyon --features preview-mupdf
On Windows MSVC, install the repository's vcpkg dependencies and Rust archive
tools first:
$env:VCPKG_OVERLAY_PORTS = "$PWD\dist\vcpkg-ports"
cargo vcpkg build
rustup component add llvm-tools-preview
$env:VCPKG_ROOT = "$PWD\target\vcpkg"
$env:VCPKGRS_TRIPLET = "x64-windows-static-release"
$env:TEXYON_DEP_BACKEND = "vcpkg"
$env:RUSTFLAGS = "-Ctarget-feature=+crt-static"
cargo build --release -p texyon --features "preview-mupdf,external-harfbuzz"
Run the extension's tests with npm test (no install step is needed). Set
TEXYON_PREVIEW_BIN to a built binary to include the real-server smoke test.
License
The extension and the bundled engine (which links MuPDF) are distributed under
the GNU AGPL v3 or later. The portable TeXyon libraries are MIT licensed and
do not enable the MuPDF backend by default.
