Visual mode: bring in co-authors who don't write LaTeX

Every research group has one. The co-author with brilliant ideas who opens a .tex file, sees \begin{tabular}{@{}lrr@{}}, and closes it again. So their edits arrive as a Word document with tracked changes, or as a PDF covered in sticky notes, and someone has to retype them.

Visual mode removes that step. Your co-author edits the paper directly, in a view that looks like the paper.

What Visual mode shows

Switch to Visual with the toggle in the editor header. The same file now renders:

• Headings as headings, with the title block laid out
• Math rendered, not as \frac{\partial u}{\partial t}
• Tables as real tables you can click into
• Figures with the actual images
• Lists, theorems, citations and cross-references as readable chips
  

It's still LaTeX underneath. Visual mode doesn't convert your document into some other format and back again. Code and Visual edit the very same text, so switching between them keeps your cursor position, your undo history and live collaboration. You can be in Code mode while your co-author is in Visual mode, typing in the same paragraph.

Formatting without commands

The toolbar does what you'd expect from any editor: bold, italic, headings, bulleted and numbered lists. It also covers the things specific to academic writing:

• inline math, display math and numbered equations
• theorem and proof blocks
• footnotes, labels, references and citations
• Insert table and Insert figure
  

Click into a table in Visual mode and a table toolbar appears: add or delete rows and columns, change column alignment, switch between All borders, Booktabs rules and No borders, and place the caption above or below. Your co-author gets a properly formatted table without writing a single \toprule by hand.

Who it's for

• Supervisors and senior authors who read and comment more than they type
• Co-authors from other fields: the clinician on a medical paper, the economist on an interdisciplinary grant
• Students in their first month of LaTeX, who can see what each command does as they write it
• You, on a bad day. Sometimes you just want to fix a typo in a table without counting ampersands.

What it doesn't try to do

Visual mode is for writing and editing, not for designing a document class. If you're writing TikZ diagrams or tuning a custom macro, Code mode is the right place. One click takes you there and you land on the same line.

Try it

Open any project and click Visual in the editor header. If you're starting from scratch, pick the Article template so there's a title, a section and some math to look at straight away.

Create a free account and invite the co-author you've been retyping edits for.