Writing text

Everything on this page works wherever you type prose: in a paragraph, a heading, a list, a quotation, the lines of a theorem and the abstract.

Formatting

Select some text: a small menu appears above the selection.

On a Mac, use ⌘ instead of Ctrl.

Formats combine: bold italic, underlined bold, and so on. In the PDF they are LaTeX's own \textbf, \textit, \uline and \sout.

Colour

The A button turns the menu into a palette: red, orange, green, blue, purple and grey. Pick one to colour the selection; the crossed circle puts it back to the default colour, and the arrow returns to the menu without changing anything.

• Six colours, the same in the editor and in the PDF. There is no free colour picker: these six stay readable on white and when printed.
• A formula inside the selection takes the colour too. To colour only part of a formula, use the Colour button of the formula itself — see Equation.
• What you type right after a coloured word is not coloured. Type first, then select and colour.
• An underline or a strikethrough is drawn in the colour of its text.
• Not in a heading, where the button is not offered: a coloured title would colour its line of the table of contents. Not in a caption, a table cell or a footnote either, which are plain text.
• A coloured word copied from a web page arrives in the default colour.

In the PDF a coloured word is \textcolor[HTML]{D32F2F}{word}, with the xcolor package.

A line break inside a paragraph

Shift+Enter breaks the line without starting a new paragraph. Enter alone starts a new block.

A formula inside a sentence

Four ways to write maths in the middle of a sentence:

• type it between dollar signs — $x^2$ — and it becomes a formula as you type the closing $;
• press Ctrl+M to insert an empty formula;
• select some text and click the formula button of the menu: the selected text becomes the formula's source;
• with the caret in the sentence, click a symbol in the Symbols tab of the left column: it is inserted as a formula. A plain symbol (α, ≤, ∞) is set in the line at once; a command with arguments (a fraction, a sum) opens its source so you can fill them in.

Click a formula to edit its source. The formula stays rendered in the line while a small panel shows the source and a live preview. Enter closes the panel, Shift+Enter adds a line to the source, and Tab jumps to the next empty {} of a command.

A price such as "30$ a month" is left alone: the opening $ must start a word and be followed by a character.

For a formula on its own line, with a number, use the Equation block.

Footnotes

Put the caret where the note's number should appear and press Ctrl+Shift+F, or select text and click the footnote button. Type the note in the panel and press Enter.

• Notes are numbered in the order they appear in the document, as LaTeX numbers them.
• The text of a note is plain: no formatting and no formula inside it yet.
• A note cannot be placed in a heading.
• An empty note is removed rather than printed.

Cross-references and citations

• Ctrl+Alt+R inserts a reference to a numbered element — "see Figure 3". See Numbering and references.
• Ctrl+Alt+C inserts a citation of an entry of your bibliography — "[2]". See Citing sources.

Special characters

Type them as they are. The characters LaTeX treats as commands — %, &, $, #, _, {, }, ~, ^, \ — are printed as ordinary characters. Text is never interpreted as LaTeX: typing \textbf{x} in a paragraph prints exactly that.

Typographic characters are printed correctly: curly apostrophes and quotation marks, French guillemets « », dashes – and —, the ellipsis …, œ, €, °, ±, ×, ½, non-breaking spaces, and accented letters of European languages (é, ñ, ø, ř, ł, ő…). Greek letters and common signs typed directly in a sentence (α, ≤, →, ∞) are printed too.

What text cannot do

• No links. A web address is printed as plain text. Only the links of the bibliography are clickable.
• No highlighting, no font or size change, no colour outside the palette. Emphasis is bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and the six colours.
• No raw LaTeX in text. Commands are printed, not run. Formulas are the only place where you write LaTeX.
• Other writing systems and emoji are not printed. Cyrillic, Greek words, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and emoji are missing from the PDF's font. Individual Greek letters work, as mathematical symbols.