TeXnicCenter is what we call an integrated documentation environment (IDE) for LaTeX. That means that TeXnicCenter integrates all the functionality you need to create, write, build, fix, view and print your LaTeX documents. TeXnicCenter’s innovative user interface, its powerful features, its large community (more than 1,000,000 users all over the world) and the fact that it is Free Open Source Software (GPL) makes it the first choice for LaTeX authors working on the Windows platform. Read on to learn, what TeXnicCenter can do for you!
Creating new Documents
You often have to create new LaTeX documents? You will love TeXnicCenter. Its powerful template mechanism allows you to define document templates once and create new documents based on these templates by simply choosing the ‘New’ option from the ‘File’ menu. The COM-Plug-In mechanism allows every one to implement document wizards. Some quite useful wizards are already available on the internet.
Writing Documents
Instead of having to use several different tools like i.e. an editor for writing the document and the LaTeX command line tools for building them, TeXnicCenter provides all necessary tools from within its powerful user interface. The powerful LaTeX editor including syntax highlighting, auto completion, realtime spell checking, dynamic word wrapping and a lot more makes it a joy to enter and maintain your texts. Tons of predefined text snippets and LaTeX commands available from the menus and the toolbars make it needless to search the LaTeX reference. The project support in conjunction with the sophisticated structure parser helps you to always keep the overview of your whole document, even if it is spread about several files and contains hundreds of pages: The structure parser always shows the document structure and jumping to another section or inserting references just requires a mouse click.
Building Output
The flexible and fully configurable build system makes it easy for you to build you document’s output using any target format you like. The possibility to define as much output profiles as needed enables you to quickly change between i.e. DVI, PDF or PS output. Direct support for MakeIndex and BibTeX and the flexible post processor mechanism make it easy to build any tool chain you can think of. Starting the build of your document just requires you to hit one key or choose the relevant menu item. TeXnicCenter will parse LaTeX’s log output and highlight box errors, warnings and errors. With just a mouse click you can jump to the relevant positions in your source text.
Viewing Output
For each output profile you can also define which document viewer to use and how to invoke it. Support for either command line or DDE calls enables a tight integration of your favourite document viewer like i.e. MiKTeX’s Previewer, Ghostview and Adobe Reader including features like forward and inverse search and instance reusage (open new documents in the already running instance of the viewer instead of opening a new one).
Configuration
To provide you with a quick start, TeXnicCenter’s auto configuration wizard just requires you to enter the path to your TeX installation. It will then automatically create three output profiles that can be instantly used to generate the following output formats:
- profiles-viewer
- DVI
- PostScript (using dvips) and
- PDF (using pdftex)
Customization
Though TeXnicCenter’s user interface with all its menus, toolbars and sidebars provides what you might expect from a Windows application, we also ensured, that it is fully usable via keyboard, to provide you quick access to all features. To make your work even more productive, you can customize all shortcuts and toolbars to your needs.
