are there any kde or qt-based latex editors with live preview (perhaps in a preview pane on the side)? by 'live preview', i mean preview-as-you-type, real-time updating. also, i'm new to latex and ubuntu, so the more user-friendly the program is, the better.

(i've read a little bit about kile, but it doesn't look like there's an automatic live preview.)

thanks!

By far, the most user friendly LaTeX front-end is LyX because on it you can both insert LaTeX code directly or use a graphical interface. LyX do not give you a "real time view", but shows something similar to the final output: it use the "wyswym" concept (what you see is what you mean).
I wrote my PhD thesis on it and it is great.
Oh, yes, it is a Qt app

Hi
I am pretty happy with "texworks". Even though it is a very early version it is very stable. There is no live preview either but synchronisation between code and pdf. It's also written in Qt and maybe something for more advanced users since there are almost no menus.
dcrabs

thanks for the repies.

i know lyx, but it seems more like a wysiwyg frontend for latex. i've tried it before on windows, but i guess i can try it again.

i'll also check out texworks, but i am a beginner, so it might not be right for me.

i found gummi: http://gummi.midnightcoding.org/

i suppose i was looking for something like that, but with qt.

You cannot have a live preview of LaTeX because it works over the whole paragraph and the whole page; unlike a word-processor where the whitespace is inserted at the end of the line, whitespace is not added until the end of the paragraph. Similarly, the space between paragraphs is not calculated until the end of the page and the positioning of figures and tables is only calculated after the page has been completed.

There are numerous other typesetting features which cannot be represented easily on a traditional screen which is why LaTeX has always had separate input and preview modes.

WYSIWYG was invented by Microsoft as a marketing ploy 15 years ago because their wordprocessor was so bad no one used it for serious work; for the previous 15 years no one had seen any need for it and LaTeX users have never seen any use for it. If you can wean yourself off it, you will soon realise that it is pretty unhelpful in most contexts.

Note that I have just used a non-WYSIWYG interface to enter this!

Sorry, I know this is an old thread, but there is in fact a LaTeX editor with live updating preview called gummi:

http://gummi.midnightcoding.org/

It's far from perfect; the nature of LaTeX does make more a less than smooth live preview.

Also, it's written in Python/GTK and thus is better suited for Gnome than qt/kde, though I don't see why you couldn't try it.