All documentation

Organising your documents

The dashboard is where your documents live. Its left column has one entry per view.

Projects

All your documents, as cards showing the first page of their PDF.

  • New Document creates a document and asks for its name.
  • Click a card to open the document in the editor.
  • The menu of a card (three dots, shown on hover) offers: Rename, Labels, Download PDF, Export (.zip) and delete.

The preview on a card is the first page of the last compiled PDF. A document that has never been compiled shows a placeholder; one that changed since its last compilation keeps its preview, marked Recompile to update. After a compilation the preview is redrawn when you come back to the dashboard: for a moment the card shows the previous page, then the new one.

A preview holds up to the first three pages. Hover a card and use the arrows on its sides to look at the next ones — the dots under the page say where you are. The card goes back to its first page when the pointer leaves it.

A document's name and its title

The name is what you see in the dashboard and what the downloaded file is called. The title printed on the first page is typed in the editor, and falls back on the name while it is empty. Renaming a document does not change a title you typed.

Labels and the Workspace

A label is a coloured tag. A document can carry several, which makes labels more flexible than folders: the same document can sit under "Thesis" and "To proofread".

  • Create a label from Projects, with a name and a colour.
  • Attach or detach labels from a document's menu, under Labels.

The Workspace view uses labels as folders:

  • choose a label on the left to see the documents that carry it;
  • New Document there creates a document already carrying the label;
  • Add to folder attaches the label to an existing document;
  • hover a label to rename it, change its colour, or delete it.

Deleting a label never deletes documents: it only removes the tag from them.

Templates

A template is a document already laid out, with short example content that says what to put in its place.

  • Lecture notes — chapters and sections with a table of contents, a definition, a theorem and its proof, an example, a remark and a list of exercises, all numbered for you.
  • Report — an abstract, a table of contents, numbered sections, an equation, a table, a figure waiting for its image, and a reference list with its citations.

Each card shows the template's own first pages: hover it and use the arrows to see the next ones. Click a card for its description and its full PDF. New document with template creates a document of your own from it, with your name on the title page, and opens it. A template is not used up: you can start from it as often as you like, and what you change stays in your document.

The Bin

Deleting a document moves it to the Bin.

  • Restore puts it back among your projects, unchanged.
  • Delete permanently removes it for good, with its images and PDFs. This cannot be undone.
  • A document left in the bin is deleted permanently after 30 days. Each card shows how many days are left.

Storage

The bar under the tabs of the dashboard shows how much of your storage is used: 100 MB per account.

  • What counts: what you write in your documents, and the images of their figures — including the documents waiting in the bin.
  • What does not: the compiled PDFs and the previews drawn from them. Compiling never uses your storage.

Text weighs almost nothing; images are what fills the bar. From 80 % the bar changes colour and tells you how to make room.

When the storage is full, adding an image and creating a new document are refused — nothing else. You can always keep writing in the documents you have, save and compile.

An account holds up to 200 documents, the bin included.

To make room:

  • Empty the bin. Deleting a document permanently frees its content and its images at once.
  • Remove unused images. An image whose figure you deleted or replaced is kept for 7 days — so an undo still finds it — and counts until then. Remove unused images now, shown under the bar from 80 %, deletes them straight away, for good. The images your figures still use are never touched.
  • Delete figures you no longer need, then remove the unused images as above.

Downloading a PDF from the dashboard

Download PDF in a card's menu works without opening the document. If the document changed since its last compilation, you choose between compiling first and downloading the previous version.

Exporting a document

Export (.zip) in a card's menu downloads an archive of the document: its LaTeX source, the images and code listings the source refers to, its PDF, and the document as Texifine stores it. It is the way to keep a copy of your work outside Texifine, or to compile it elsewhere. As for the PDF, you choose whether to compile first when the document changed. See Exporting a document for what each file is.

A document in the bin cannot be exported: restore it first.

Statistics

The Statistics view shows what you have written and when you worked on it.

  • Four figures: your documents, their words, and — over the last 30 days — your compilations and the days you were active.
  • Activity: a calendar of the last twelve months, one square per day, darker when more was compiled. Under it: your current and longest runs of consecutive days, your busiest day, how long a compilation takes on average, and the days of the week you work on.
  • What your documents are made of: how many headings, paragraphs, equations, theorems, figures… they contain.
  • Your documents: one line each, with its words, blocks and compilations. Click a column to sort by it, a name to open the document.

Things worth knowing:

  • Activity is counted in compilations, because that is what is dated. A document compiles by itself a few seconds after you stop typing, so a day you wrote is a day that is filled in. With automatic compilation switched off, only the days you pressed Compile are. A PDF served again unchanged is not counted.
  • Nothing is recorded to draw this page. It is read from your documents and from the record of their compilations.
  • Documents in the bin are not counted. A document deleted for good takes its compilations with it: its days leave the calendar.
  • A day is a day where you are: the calendar follows your computer's time zone.
  • Words are those of your text: formulas, code and table cells are not counted.

Your account

Click your name at the bottom of the left column — in the dashboard or in the editor — and open Settings.

  • First and last name can be changed.
  • Email cannot be changed yet.
  • Delete account removes your account and everything in it — documents, images, PDFs, labels — immediately and permanently. You confirm by typing your email address, and your password if you have one.

Log out is in the same menu.

What is not there yet

  • No sharing and no collaboration. A document belongs to one account.
  • No duplicate. A document cannot be copied.
  • No version history. The editor saves the current state; there is no way back to an earlier one beyond your browser's undo while you are editing.
  • No import of an existing .tex or Word file, nor of an archive exported from Texifine.
  • No export of all your documents at once. Each document is exported from its own menu.