Text Editors/Windows
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[edit] Choosing a text editor & compiling
[edit] For newbies (like Word (ex)users)
 | TODO: Explain the difference between GUI/text editor/compiler/PDF document; people often ask me: "ConTeXt - oh, you mean that program with a blue screen and colourful fonts?" (See: To-Do List) |
- SciTE or WinEdt or Textpad or TeXnicCenter may be a good choice for a newbie.
WinEdt has a rich graphical user-interface, but more support for LaTeX than for ConTeXt. (You need to install WinEdt AFTER the installtion of MikTeX, GhostScript and Adobe Reader for Windows.)
ConTeXt support for SciTE was written by Hans Hagen (the ConTeXt developer himself) and also includes recognition and auto-completion of most frequent ConTeXt commands.
According to their web-site: "TeXnicCenter is a feature rich integrated development environment (IDE) for developing LaTeX-documents on Microsoft Windows (Windows 9x/ME, NT/2000/XP) freely available under GPL." It can also be used for processing ConTeXt documents.
| TODO: Someone should write how to install SciTE & ConTeXt support for it without installing the stand-alone ConTeXt. (See: To-Do List) |
[edit] For gurus (like (La)TeX users or programmers)
You probably already have your favourite text editor (or at least you know what we're talking about) and you may skip this. If not, take a look at the text editor page to help you choose one.
- Vim or Emacs may be a good choice if you're willing to invest some time into learning them - it may be worth the effort.
[edit] Compiling
After you've done all that, you can finally use your favourite editor to write your first document.
To compile it, open the command line again (Start -> Run ... -> type cmd or command) and run
texexec yourfilename
Some text editors support automatic compiling:
- F7 (= command Build in Tools menu) or Ctrl+1 (= command Process TeX file in Tools menu) in SciTE
- ?? in WinEdt
- F?? in TeXnicCenter
- see makefile for Vim
