Texpad Help (v1.4)
Texpad is a LaTeX editor for iOS, delivered as a single universal app for iPad and iPhone. It is designed for fast navigation around LaTeX projects of all sizes. Given a single LaTeX root file, it will read through the LaTeX source, and that of all included files to present you with an outline of your project.
It is capable of typesetting the LaTeX and BibTeX source both locally and in the cloud with our secure servers. The resulting PDF can be viewed within Texpad along with a list of all errors or warnings encountered during the typeset process. Clicking on this list will navigate to the line of source responsible for the error.
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Quick Guide
Menu Bar Buttons
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The Home button in the top left corner brings up a menu for accessing all local (iPad/iPhone) and cloud (such as Dropbox) LaTeX files and for customising the editor. |
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The Email button adjacent to the Home button allows you to send current LaTeX and/or PDF files as an email attachement. |
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Tap the Search button to hunt for a search term in all open files.
If you are familiar with regexes, any term surrounded by forward slashes will be
interpreted as a regex, for example searching for /state[sd]?/ will
return instances of state, states and stated.
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The Cloud Typeset and Local Typeset buttons initiate the typesetting. When using the cloud option, for the duration of the typeset, the button morphs into a Cancel... button which may be used to cancel a typeset request while its in progress. |
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Upon successful typeset, the Log button may be used to access any errors or warning highlighted by the LaTeX typeset tools. |
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Finally, tapping the PDF button brings up the output of a typeset, if any. |
Gestures
Texpad's editor supports various gestures to aid your writing. These include,Two finger swipe
Swiping two fingers left or right on the editor view will move the cursor left or right, swiping two fingers up or down will move the cursor up or down.
Three finger swipe
Select text and swipe three fingers right to comment out LaTeX source, and left to uncomment it again.
File Storage
Texpad caters for two ways of storing your LaTeX documents, local storage on your iPad or iPhone and cloud storage, with an integrated Dropbox interface. These are accessible via the Home button. or  |
Local Storage -- iPad/iPhone: The iPad/iPhone storage is the local, on-device storage. Working with this does not require internet connectivity as all files are stored on the device. This storage may be managed via iTunes. |
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Dropbox: Dropbox storage requires a Dropbox account and working with files stored in your Dropbox folder requires internet connection. |
Typesetting
Texpad comes with two typesetting options:
Local Typesetting:
The local typesetter is built upon a Texpad-specific LaTeX distribution, natively-run on iOS of you iPad or iPhone. This provides a fast, almost-instant Typesetting option. The local typesetter is also capable of typesetting BibTeX. If a BibTeX file is detected in your project, Texpad will automatically run it (in the sequence LaTeX, BibTeX, LaTeX, LaTeX).
Please note that the list of packages in the local typesetter is not as comprehensive as the full LaTeX distribution that comes bundled with, for instance, with TexLive or MikTex. If a LaTeX package you are interested in is missing from Texpad's local engine, please write to us at support@vallettaventures.com so we can add it to the next version.
Cloud Typesetting:
Cloud typesetting is done on Texpad's free cloud servers. The cloud typesetter packages your LaTeX source code and send it over a secure (HTTPS) connection to our servers where the files are typeset, and the PDF and the log are sent back to your device.
Once the typeset operation has completed, we delete user files off our servers immediately, regardless of the outcome of the typeset. The servers are secure, the files are transferred securely and we will never read or share your work. If this is not sufficient security for you then we are in the process of open sourcing the typesetting server so that you can typeset on your own secure server, please get in contact if you need this.
Cloud typesetting may be customised by using alternative typesetting chains via preferences. These include, XeLaTeX, pLaTeX (for Japanese) and tools for compiling through DVI and PostScript routes.
Also note,
- The cloud typesetting engine also parses the code to see if
bibtexormakeindexneed to be run and does so automatically. - Starting from v1.2, all images included in the LaTeX source using
\includegraphics{}tags will also be compiled by the cloud typesetter. - v1.3 brings support for images to the local typesetting engine.
Settings
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Editor Preferences: You may customise your editor by changing the font and size. Also, choose the file encoding you wish to work with. Be careful because if you choose the wrong encoding your documents will fail to open. We recommend you work with UTF-8, it is the most compatible, most widely used and by far the most hassle free option. |
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Typesetting Preferences: The local typesetter provides the most standard typesetting engines, pdflatex and bibtex. In addition to the standard options, the cloud typesetter however, provides non-standard typesetting chains such as XeLaTeX and pLaTeX (for Japanese) as well as biber. Please use these with care, and only for documents that explicitly require it. Once done with such documents, remember to revert the options back to the standard ones. |
Appendix
Packages included* in the local typesetter:
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Disclaimers
External Licences
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This application uses code based on EGOTextView which is used under the following license:
Created by Devin Doty on 4/18/11.
Copyright (C) 2011 by enormego.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. - Bundled Fonts:
- OpenDyslexic by Abelardo Gonzalez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
- Source Sans Pro has an open source license.
- Source Code Pro has an open source license.
- Verily Serif Mono has an open source license.
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The underlying LaTeX and BibTeX engines are built upon Kertex-based TeX distribution with the following license (note that the text is a verbatim copy of the relevant section of file COPYRIGHTS.kertex in the kertex bundle):
EXTERNAL SOURCES (reorganised for link with kerTeX), USED BUT NEITHER DIRECTLY INCLUDED NOR COVERED BY THE LICENCE Donald E. Knuth's whole system for digital typesetting (METAFONT, CM, TeX) and utilities, plus WEB, and, with Silvio Levy, CWEB. This software is still maintained by the author; but the licence permits the use, the compilation and the distribution of named results mf(1) and tex(1) if the implementation passes the torture tests. They do. [in "Knuth" sources] Silvio Levy for CWEB with Donald E. Knuth (Silvio Levy still maitaining as far as I know). ["Knuth" sources] Oren Patashnik for BibTeX (0.99d). (same type of licence as the one covering D.E. Knuth's work). Still maintained by author as far as I know. [bibtex sources] The NTS team for e-TeX (v2.1) : Joachim Lammarsch, Philip Taylor, Peter Breitenlohner, Jiri Zlatuska, Bernd Raichle, Friedhelm Sowa. Licence TeX one like. [etex "sources"] The AMS provided supplementary fonts and/or font formats (i.e. the CM related pfb files), version 3.02, are included here and are covered by the SIL licence. See OFL.txt. [ams "sources"] The Adobe .afm files for PostScript(R) base fonts were published by Adobe (retrieved from CTAN: Adobe-Core35_AFMs-315.tar.gz). The licence allow use, distribution etc. with the copyright. [adobe "sources"]. BULK WORK OF WHAT IS DIRECTLY INCLUDED The main authors of the original code _included here_ were: Tomas Rokicki for dvips (5.76, was Public Domain) and dvips auxiliary programs. John Hobby from ATT for MetaPost (public domain 0.641). Donald E. Knuth for programs _included here_ with Tomas Rokicki for dvips auxiliary tools. Tanmoy Bhattacharya for the hyperbasics.tex macro file (public domain). The AUTHORS stands for: - The original authors listed above, for credits. But they have no responsability for the present resulting work. - Thierry LARONDE
Terms of Use
- Texpad's cloud typesetters use secure HTTPS connection to transfer data from user's iOS device to typesetting servers and back. At the end of each typeset, this data is instantly deleted as the result (the PDF and the error log) is posted back to the user. No user data is persisted on Valletta Ventures' servers. In the case of any server failure, user data is deleted upon resuscitating, but no further guarantees are provided as to the security of this data.
- Valletta Ventures is not responsible for any loss of any data caused by a device crash.