LaTeXila 3.18 has been released last week. There are some nice improvements:
- New buttons in the integrated file browser (in the side panel) to open the current directory in a file manager (e.g. Nautilus) or in the terminal. Thanks to Arnaud Blouin, the developer of LaTeXDraw.
- Better read-only mode for the default build tools. Only the personal build tools can be modified, the default build tools are read-only. Before, it was confusing because when opening a default build tool, it was possible to edit the fields (but the changes weren’t saved). Now the distinction is much clearer.
- More modern design for the dialog windows.
But the most important news is for the spell checking, which has been significantly improved this development cycle:
- A new library called gspell has been created. The source code comes from gedit. Read this blog post for the technical story.
- The LaTeX commands are no longer marked as misspelled.
- In the preferences dialog, you can change the default settings for the spell checking: the language and whether misspelled words are underlined in red in the document.
- Via the Tools menu, the spell checking settings can be changed and are stored on a file-by-file basis.
- There is now a spell checker dialog window, to spell check an entire file.
Spell checking in LaTeXila 3.18
The spell checking improvements have been possible thanks to the fundraiser, so thanks a lot for your support!
Speaking about it, the fundraiser has been re-targeted. Unfortunately the €10,000 milestone has little chances to be reached. That milestone included lots of LaTeX-specific improvements to LaTeXila. Now the fundraiser focuses more on the usefulness for other text editors, not just for LaTeXila. For example gspell will be useful for a lot of other GTK+ applications where the spell checking is needed.
Need of a graphics designer for the app icon
Since several years, LaTeXila is a quite good and stable LaTeX editor for GNU/Linux. It’s a lightweight but feature-full editor, that don’t gets in the way.
But, the application icon is still quite ugly. For the visual identity of LaTeXila, it would be better to have a better icon. Since I’m not good at graphics design, I need some help. If anyone is interested, please contact me!
Thanks in advance!
