Making TeX Work

Chapter 9. Previewing

Because TeX is not interactive, most TeX documents are developed iteratively. After adding a significant amount of text or changing the format of a document, you'll want to see what the document looks like. Then you can add more text or try different formats. Then, it's helpful to see it again $...$

You could print the document, but that's wasteful and slow (not to mention environmentally unfriendly). This is where screen previewers enter the picture. They allow you to look at your document on a video display.

Accurate previewing is more difficult than printing your document for several reasons. Screen displays are much more diverse than printers (previewing on a PC is very different from previewing on a workstation running X11 even though printing to a LaserJet printer is essentially the same from both places). Also, it's very difficult to preview documents that use printer-specific features. For example, if you use a PostScript figure in your document, it will be very easy to print on a PostScript printer, but on most platforms it is much more difficult to preview that document on the screen (two exceptions are the Amiga and NeXT which have integrated support for displaying PostScript images).

In the following sections I'll explore options for previewing on several platforms. The X Window System is usually associated with unix workstations, but several PC implementations (running under both MS-DOS and OS/2) are now available. The X11 previewers described ...