User's Manual

Getting Started

Menu Choices

Explore the GUI by looking through the menu choices. Click on anything that you find interesting and watch where the formatting instructions are placed. Also observe the built in help for each menu item.

Start a text editor such as gvim, emacs or nedit and try to paste text from LaHelper to the text editor. The text from each menu item is automatically sent to the clipboard, so a standard Edit...Paste command should insert the text into your text editor. Also, clicking the third mouse button will paste the text into the window that has input focus.

Toolbar Buttons

Open

The Open button will prompt you for a file. Use the dialog box to select a LaTeX file, and LaHelper will start a text editor for you to start working on the document. This step also causes LaHelper to change to the same directory as your document and sets the project name.

Make

The Make button will execute the make command in the current directory. A Makefile can be used to automate the translation from the plain text source to various output formats including DVI, PS, PDF, and HTML.

Clear

The Clear button will clear the text preview area.

Copy

The Copy button will copy the text to the clipboard. This button only needs to be used if you modify the text and want to paste the new text to your text editor.

Term

The Term button will create a notebook tab containing a command terminal similar to gnome-terminal.

Draw

The Draw button will start a vector drawing program. The default drawing program is xfig.

Image

The Image button will start an image editor program. The default image editor is the GIMP.

DVI

The DVI button will start a DVI viewer. The default DVI viewer is xdvi.

PS

The PS button will start a postscript viewer. The default PS viewer is ggv.

PDF

The PDF button will start a PDF viewer. The default PDF viewer is acroread.

Exit

The Exit button will close the LaHelper application.