jupyterlab / jupyterlab-latex

JupyterLab extension for live editing of LaTeX documents

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License

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UX improvements #243

Closed ktaletsk closed 2 months ago

ktaletsk commented 2 months ago

This PR is the reintroduction of the #192 initially implemented by Team 1318, a Georgia Tech Junior Design team in the 2021-2022 school year:

@ladyron
@Cbarr-hub
@quintfain
@JadenMcElvey
@ZX-80
@darklordsep1

It was brought up to date and prepared for merging by @akisaini.

Changes

Toolbar menu at the top of the document with shortcuts to common LaTeX editing tasks
- Preview Button (easier way to trigger LaTeX compilation; currently triggered by clicking 'Show LaTeX Preview' in the context menu)
- Typeface Modifier GUI (subscript, superscript, bold, italic, underlined)
- Text Layout Customization GUI: This feature allows the user to format a paragraphs layout (alignment for example)
- Add plot (from list of canned tikzplots templates): simple function plot, plot from file, scatter plot, bar graphs, contour plot, parametric plot
- Table Creation GUI (select number of rows and columns to create a table with dummy data)
- Bullet Point and Numbered List
Error Log Filtering options
Main menu section with additional helpers
- Constant Menu
- Symbol Menu
Tab-autocomplete for common LaTeX tags

User research

The added features were selected as a result of the user research amongst NIH community.

People from the following fields were surveyed:
- Software Engineering
- Data Science
- Cheminformatics
- Virology
- Drug discovery
- Bioinformatics
- Student

What was the most difficult about using LaTeX?
- The lack of the good editor
- Memorizing settings that has not been used for long time
- Layout
- Formatting of things that aren't text
- Sharing docs with colleagues
- Lack of rich features present in MS word
- Table generation
- Graph creation
Features that users would like to see within JupyterLab-LaTeX?
- Table generator
- Equation generation
- Literate programming like environment (e.g., cweb)
- Real time collaboration
- GUI for tables and figures would be amazing
- Easy/simple simultaneous render of formatted document and what is being typed
- Robust templates for journals to "auto apply" pre-review AND post-review formatting required

github-actions[bot] commented 2 months ago

:point_left: Launch a Binder on branch jupyterlab/jupyterlab-latex/ux-improvements

jtpio commented 2 months ago

Sorry for the late review @ktaletsk.

It looks great, thanks for working on this!

ktaletsk commented 2 months ago

No worries @jtpio !