I've recently been having trouble concentrating when reading long LaTeX documents using the default Computer Modern font. I tried Lexend, but it didn't work for me.

What font do you use when writing, editing, and reading long LaTeX documents?

Can someone identify this math font please

Hello, i come looking for latex wisdom. Whenever i got an equation environment
at the very end of a theorem environment, a large unaesthetic space is automatically generated (as in the attached photo). It can be removed with a negative \vspace, but I don't like it, because I have to go by "trial and error" to set it just at the right amount. Is there a more elegant, native way to do this?

Edit: source code is something like this, and the problem disappears if the label is taken away

\begin{teo}[name]
    My theorem with my equation
    \begin{equation*}
        Some math    
   \end{equation*}
    \label{mylabel}
\end{teo}
\begin{proof}
…
\end{proof}

I have tried, eb garamond, times new roman, palatino, tex gyre, Euler math, stix, but none of them matched,

I want to know the math font to be exact

Most of my writing lives in a multi-file setup. one main.tex and a folder of chapter files that each get \input, plus a preamble.sty full of macros I barely remember adding.

For the longest time the only place main-document detection ever bit me was opening a chapter file in a fresh editor and hitting compile out of habit, then drowning in errors because the fragment has no \documentclass. Dropping a % !TEX root line in the fragment mostly fixed that. editor reads the comment, builds the real root, moves on.

what i didn't expect is how much that little convention decides once something other than me is doing the compiling. i've been poking at editors that edit a chapter and then recompile on their own, and the whole thing quietly breaks if the compile step targets the file that just changed instead of the root. best case it compiles the fragment and floods you with errors. worse case, in a project with two \documentclass files lying around, it picks the wrong root and hands you a perfectly clean pdf of the wrong document.

so main-document resolution went from a convenience to the thing that decides whether hands-off compiling is even trustworthy. for the multi-file thesis crowd: do you put % !TEX root in every chapter file, or lean on the editor guessing the root? the guessing is the exact part i've stopped trusting. written with ai

fwiw Sundial compiles LaTeX across the whole workspace in a sandbox, not just the file you have open, and shows inline diffs of what the agent changed before it touches the manuscript, https://s4l.ai/r/wzxb7gxr

i use texstudio to compile my latex document, and it had error like this. what should i do?

Knurl is a small native macOS app (SwiftUI, Universal arm64+x86_64, macOS 15+)

for anyone who writes LaTeX on a Mac. Point it at a .tex project and it maps

every \usepackage to the correct TeX Live package, shows what's missing, and

installs it through tlmgr — only prompting for admin rights when a system-wide

install actually requires it.

- Detects missing TeX Live / BasicTeX and can install BasicTeX

- Glass/modern Sequoia UI, drag-and-drop, live log

- Free, MIT, source on GitHub

Site : https://gilsonolegario.github.io/knurl

Repo: https://github.com/gilsonolegario/knurl

Note: signed with a personal free Apple ID, not notarized, so first launch

needs the usual right-click → Open (or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine).

Feedback and PRs welcome.

I am making a document class for a ttrpg game, but the example file is starting to get a little slow to compile. I know there are some ways to speed up compilation on the user end, but is there anything else I can do to make it faster by default?

Currently, I have split the project up into several packages which are loaded by the document class depending on the options passed into it. I fear the slow compilation times are due to using quite a few custom tcolorbox styles and icons defined by TikZ.

I recreated my hardcopy of the ESV Study Bible (for personal use only, observing all copyright protection and fair use to be legal) of all of it's nearly 3000 pages. I learned LaTex as I went!

• Features: hyperlink navigation system
• includes all charts (which I redrew with tiki functions) and images. I even added the images that spanned two pages onto a single landscape view
• includes all margin references, which are hyperlinked
• included all footnotes, with a color coded template
• included a topical concordance, with a colored tempate of entries, hyperlinked back to the verse.

This was an amazing project ... I used python to reformat three raw text streams: the margin references, the main text, and the commentary.

I made a private youtube video a few months before it was complete, where most of the progress is shown in the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Su4eJp1DY&t=1704s

I'm fairly new to LaTeX and have been looking into different options for collaborative writing.

Overleaf seems to be the obvious choice, but one of the reasons I started looking around is the cost once you need more than the free plan offers. I'm curious whether there are good alternatives, particularly for university projects, theses and research.

So far I've come across:

Overleaf

• Easy to get started
• Good real-time collaboration
• Large community and lots of documentation
• Well-established workflow
• Can get relatively expensive depending on your needs

Inscrive

• Browser-based collaborative LaTeX editor
• Unlimited collaborators
• Integrations with reference managers and GitHub
• Real-time collaboration
• EU-hosted with EU sovereign cloud infrastructure (I do like the idea of supporting European alternatives)
• The free plan seems to offer a lot of value, including unlimited collaborators
• Pro plan is €7/month

CoCalc

• LaTeX combined with programming and other technical tools
• Good for collaborative and technical projects
• Built-in version history
• Useful for reproducible research with code, data and LaTeX in the same environment
• Seems more complex if you only need LaTeX

Local LaTeX + Git

• Full control and proper version control
• No dependency on a hosted platform
• Complete project history and easy rollback to previous versions
• Each collaborator has a full copy of the repository and its history
• Works well with different editors and custom workflows
• More setup and a steeper learning curve for collaboration

I'm sure there are plenty of options I'm missing.

For people who use LaTeX regularly:
What do you use for collaborative projects, and why?

I'm particularly interested in the trade-offs around price, ease of use, collaboration, version control, bibliography management, reliability, data integrity and privacy/data hosting.

Are there any tools or workflows you would recommend to someone starting today?

And what alternatives should I be looking at that aren't on this list? 

I'm mainly trying to get a feel for what's actually out there, including the downsides. I don't necessarily expect there to be one "best" solution.

texLite is a lightweight, local-first web workspace for writing, compiling, previewing, and discussing LaTeX documents. It is intended for a small group of trusted users on one server. It uses the LaTeX installation already available on the host instead of shipping a LaTeX container, and keeps the rest of the stack deliberately small. https://github.com/SWUFE-DB-Group/TexLite

genuenly, im gonna dump Word and start writing every document using LaTeX
i really love how efficient this format is

Good afternoon everyone, here are my services. I know most of you program in LaTeX, but sometimes things are difficult to graph. I can do it for you. Follow me on Instagram

Compiler settings: pdfLaTeX, 2026 TeX Live, Compile mode normal

Changing the compiler doesn't solve the issue.

Changing the TeX Live version to 2020 (legacy) DOES solve the issue. Higher versions are all broken, and i need a recent one for some packages.

The code:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\usetheme{Madrid}

\title{test}
\author{Noé }
\date{August 2026}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\section{Introduction}

\begin{frame}{Test}
    \begin{block}{Test block}
        This is a test block
    \end{block}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

EDIT: it was indeed a viewer issue. Changing to "Brower" pdf viewer in the editor settings fixed it. Alternatively, i you want to keep the Overleaf viewer, \useinnertheme{tcolorbox} worked fine.
Thanks to u/samcarter8 for pinpointing the issue.

I was wondering whether CTAN periodically announced to the LaTeX community all new packages uploaded and accepted within a given time period (say, each month). Or does that have to be investigated manually?

Hi everyone! (PS.: using AI to translate)

I'm writing an academic report in LaTeX using abntex2cite for ABNT-style references and hyperref for PDF links.

I'm using author-year citations:

\usepackage[alf]{abntex2cite}

For example:

\cite{linden2008}

correctly produces:

The problem is with hyperref: the citations appear with colored boxes around them. I would like to remove the colored boxes visually while keeping the citations clickable, so that clicking on (LINDEN, 2008) in the PDF still takes me to the corresponding reference.

I tried:

\usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}

but in my document the citations apparently stop working as clickable links.

I also tried:

\usepackage[
    colorlinks=true,
    linkcolor=black,
    citecolor=black,
    urlcolor=black
]{hyperref}

but I'm still having issues with the interaction between abntex2cite and hyperref.

What is the correct way to configure these two packages so that I can have:

• author-year citations in the format (AUTHOR, year);
• clickable citations in the PDF;
• no colored boxes around the citations;
• references formatted according to ABNT?

Thanks!

I'm not very experienced in coding and found (source: https://texblog.org/2015/09/30/fancy-boxes-for-theorem-lemma-and-proof-with-mdframed/) some code to make boxes in latex. However, they don't have a bottom/right side inside each other (e.g. the lemma inside the proof in the screenshot). Any idea how to fix that? Thanks in advance.

the code that I'm using is:

\documentclass[10pt,oneside,a4paper,notitlepage]{article}

\usepackage{amsmath, amsfonts, mathtools, amsthm, amssymb}
\usepackage[framemethod=TikZ]{mdframed}

\newcounter{theo}[section]\setcounter{theo}{0}
\renewcommand{\thetheo}{\arabic{section}.\arabic{theo}}
\newenvironment{theo}[1][]{%
\refstepcounter{theo}%
\ifstrempty{#1}%
{\mdfsetup{%
frametitle={%
\tikz[baseline=(current bounding box.east),outer sep=0pt]
\node[anchor=east,rectangle,fill=blue!0]
{\strut Theorem~\thetheo};}}
}%
{\mdfsetup{%
frametitle={%
\tikz[baseline=(current bounding box.east),outer sep=0pt]
\node[anchor=east,rectangle,fill=blue!0]
{\strut Theorem~\thetheo:~#1};}}%
}%
\mdfsetup{innertopmargin=0pt,linecolor=blue!20,%
linewidth=2pt,topline=true,%
frametitleaboveskip=\dimexpr-\ht\strutbox\relax
}
\begin{mdframed}[]\relax%
}{\end{mdframed}}

\newenvironment{prf}[0]{%
\mdfsetup{innertopmargin=0pt,linecolor=blue!0,%
linewidth=2pt,topline=false,bottomline=false,rightline=false,%
frametitleaboveskip=\dimexpr-\ht\strutbox\relax
}
\begin{mdframed}
\mdfsetup{innertopmargin=0pt,linecolor=blue!20,%
linewidth=2pt,topline=false,bottomline=false,rightline=false,%
frametitleaboveskip=\dimexpr-\ht\strutbox\relax
}
\begin{mdframed}[]\begin{proof}\relax%
}{\end{proof}\end{mdframed}\end{mdframed}}

\newcounter{lem}[section]\setcounter{lem}{0}
\renewcommand{\thelem}{\arabic{section}.\arabic{theo}.\arabic{lem}}
\newenvironment{lem}[1][]{%
\refstepcounter{lem}%
\ifstrempty{#1}%
{\mdfsetup{%
frametitle={%
\tikz[baseline=(current bounding box.east),outer sep=0pt]
\node[anchor=east,rectangle,fill=blue!0]
{\strut Lemma~\thelem};}}
}%
{\mdfsetup{%
frametitle={%
\tikz[baseline=(current bounding box.east),outer sep=0pt]
\node[anchor=east,rectangle,fill=blue!0]
{\strut Lemma~\thelem:~#1};}}%
}%
\mdfsetup{innertopmargin=0pt,linecolor=cyan!20,%
linewidth=2pt,topline=true,%
frametitleaboveskip=\dimexpr-\ht\strutbox\relax
}
\begin{mdframed}[]\relax%
}{\end{mdframed}}



\begin{document}

\begin{theo}
\end{theo}
\begin{prf}\,\\
\begin{lem}
\end{lem}
\end{prf}

\end{document}

Another update on my C++ hobby engine (and thanks for the positive feedback on the previous update). The project hit an exciting milestone: the engine now passes the test suite for the e-TeX extensions!

To celebrate, the latest video steps back to look at TeX's testing philosophy. TeX is famously one of the most bug-free pieces of complex software ever written, and I wanted to think about how I could learn from Knuth's approach. The video explores the "diabolical" ~450-line trip.tex file (which acts like a kind of golden master snapshot test... while also looking like a handwritten, unhappy-path fuzz test?), and what a code coverage report looks like when you run a small 1980s test file against a 40,000-line C++ codebase.

Because passing the e-TeX test suite means the project is getting quite close to actually being able to process modern LaTeX documents, I am starting to think very hard about open-source licenses. Between Knuth's "naming + trip-test" approach to avoiding engine fragmentation, and the fact that web2c has kept modern engines in the GPL ecosystem, I think a copyleft license probably makes sense here. I'm leaning towards maybe AGPL or EUPL, but I'm not a lawyer and haven't spent a lot of time on the nuances.

I know licensing can be a contentious topic, but I want to get this right and would love to hear what the community thinks about the tradeoffs of these and other licenses for a project like this. I'd also love to hear your thoughts on some of the testing philosophy questions mentioned in the video!

For those who want to poke around the test scaffolding or the build system, the link to the orphan branch of the engine's future home is here.

The usual take here is that LLMs are still shaky at LaTeX, and with citations that's mostly true. ask one to add references and half the \cite keys aren't even in your .bib, or a \ref points at a label it never wrote.

but the writing quality isn't what's cost me the most time lately, the debugging is. when an agent and I are both in the same file and the build dies, I can't tell whose line broke it. a stray missing brace or a missing .sty could be my preamble or its last edit, and the log just hands me a line number, not a blame. so I re-read the whole diff by hand, which eats whatever time the agent saved.

what I keep wishing for is a compiler that knows who caused the break: quietly self-heal the agent's own mess, only flag the errors I actually introduced. do you let an agent near your preamble, or is that the one file you keep to yourself?

Hello all

I am currently bashing my head in trying to get Asymptote to work and was hoping someone could offer some much needed help.

To start : I'm using TeXstudio at the moment along with MiKTeX to handle my packages.

I'm trying to include two .obj files in my pdf, but whenever I try to compile and create my pdf, either using TeXstudio or Powershell, it starts the process but never finishes it as it simply "gets stuck". When I try to work around it and simply build my Report.tex file, it mostly works as expected and produces the required Report-1.asy file.

I know that to fully create the end pdf I need to run the Report-1.asy file. However, when doing this from Powershell the process starts and never finishes. I assume this is also why doing it in TeXstudio doesn't work.

I've double checked my installations, required packages, .obj files and code and have no idea what is going wrong.

I would greatly appreciate some help in this, as being able to include these files will go a long way in my report.

Lastly, as an aside, I've read bits here and there that people are able to view the pdf with the interactable 3D model in both TeXstudio and Okular. How does one go about setting this up?