LaTeX Review and Visual Editor

Two things LaTeX in VS Code is missing, in one extension:

1. Review mode: track changes as in Word, accept or reject each change, and comment on the text.
2. Visual editor: the document drawn like the PDF in a tab beside the source, and edited there.

Your .tex file always stays plain LaTeX. It builds with LaTeX Workshop as before, and SyncTeX keeps working.

Review mode

Click Track changes in the status bar (or run LaTeX Review: Start Tracking Changes). From then on:

• inserted text is blue and underlined, deleted text is shown in red, struck through, where it was;
• a mark in the left margin shows each changed line (green: added, red: deleted, orange: rewritten);
• the Review pane (its icon in the activity bar; drag it to the right side bar to keep it beside the text) shows every change as a card with a green Accept and a red Reject, plus Accept All and Reject All; the change at the cursor is outlined, and clicking a card jumps to it;
• each change also has Accept / Reject in its hover and in the lightbulb (Ctrl+. / Cmd+.); select a passage to accept or reject all changes in it.
• Ctrl+Alt+] / Ctrl+Alt+[ (Cmd+Alt+] / Cmd+Alt+[ on Mac) go to the next or previous change.

Comments: select text, write in the Comments box of the Review pane and click Add comment; reply, resolve and delete there too. Or press Ctrl+Alt+M (Cmd+Alt+M), or click + in the gutter. Threads take replies, can be resolved, edited and deleted. Commented text is highlighted.

Export Marked-Up Copy (in the view's … menu) writes name-review.tex with the changes as \added, \deleted and \replaced and comments as \comment from the changes package, so co-authors without VS Code can read the review in the PDF.

The review is kept beside the document in .latex-review/<name>.tex.json: the text changes are measured against, and the comments. It is written when you save the document, so the two always match. Commit it to share a review through git, or add .latex-review/ to .gitignore to keep it private.

Visual editor

LaTeX Review: Open Visual Editor (Cmd+Alt+V, or the eye button in the editor title bar) opens the document in a tab beside the source, drawn like the PDF, where you edit it directly:

• Paragraphs and headings are typed like in a word processor. Enter starts a new paragraph, Backspace at the start of one joins it to the one before, Cmd+B, Cmd+I and Cmd+U make bold, italic and underlined text; a LaTeX command typed in full (\\rcmpd{1}, \\cite{key}) or $..$ math stays LaTeX (\textbf, \textit, \underline in the source).
• Equations are drawn with KaTeX (with mhchem's \ce); click one to edit its source with a live preview.
• \cite, \ref and compound labels show their numbers from the last build (the .aux). Click one, or any other command shown in purple, to edit its source.
• Figures show their picture (\includegraphics, or the PDF beside an \input drawing), with the caption and the label editable under it; a missing caption or label is added when you type one. Double-click the picture to edit the drawing in Reactio Draw.
• Tracked changes are shown in blue (added) and red (deleted); click one for Accept or Reject.
• The preamble, lists and anything else that is not drawn stay as editable source in grey boxes.

Every edit goes straight into the .tex; the source and the visual editor scroll to each other, and double-clicking text shows it in the source.

PDF view. The PDF button in the bar shows the real pages instead, built by latexmk a moment after each edit (unsaved text included, output in .latex-review/live). Click a paragraph, heading, list or equation and it opens over the page in the visual editor; Done or Esc closes it and the next build shows it typeset. Needs TeX Live or MiKTeX with latexmk and synctex (on Windows, MiKTeX's latexmk needs Perl), and a trusted workspace. While tracking is on, the pages show the tracked changes and open comments with the changes package (tlmgr install changes if TeX Live basic lacks it).

In the .tex editor too, Cmd+B, Cmd+I and Cmd+U wrap the selection in \textbf{}, \textit{} or \underline{}, and take it out again.

Bibliography from Zotero

Insert citations with any picker (for example Citation Picker for Zotero, set to format=latex). When a \cite{key} is not in the .bib file named by \bibliography{refs} or \addbibresource{refs.bib}, the extension asks Zotero for it through Better BibTeX and appends the entry (the file is created if needed). It runs on save and about a second after the set of cited keys changes. Zotero with Better BibTeX must be running. Run LaTeX Review: Update Bibliography from Zotero to do it by hand.

Settings

Colours (inserted, deleted, comment) can be changed under workbench.colorCustomizations, e.g. "latexReview.insertedForeground": "#1a56c9".

Limits

• A change is any difference from the text tracking started with, measured word by word. Changes have no author, and undoing an Accept does not bring the change back.