Kile's main features

Kile's main features

Document wizard

The wizard built into Kile is a unique feature to get a user started creating documents right away in Kile. Choosing the wizard from the taskbar gives you several choices for the creation of your document. (Insert 3 figures in this general area, a location of wizard in toolbar, close-up of wizard, and segment of code generated by wizard). This lets a user quickly specify the type of document they would like to produce, whether that is an article, a book, letter or report and set options relating to the document. The author has the ability in this section to let Kile quickly generate LaTeX code based upon the settings you have defined in the wizard.

Wizard options:

  • Document Class; what kind of document are you creating? Letter, report, book?

  • Typeface Size; what point size are you using?

  • Paper Size; What size or style of paper will you be exporting your document?

  • Encoding; Encoding is used to automatically set packages relating to the encoding (but we will get into explaining packages later)

  • Author's Name; put your name here

  • Title of Document; add your document title here

  • Other options; this allows you to set other options for printing, draft, etc.

Predefined templates

Any Kile user who is continuously writing the same type of document can take advantage of using templates in Kile. The predefined templates in Kile are:

  • Empty document : a blank template

  • Article : sets format for an article

  • Book : this template sets pages up a format for book specific document such as a page numbering scheme with page number on outside edges of paper

  • Letter : sets format for a letter with address and receipt settings

  • Report : sets format for a report

New users need not worry, these sections are just a brief description of features and more attention will be paid to completing these tasks in detail in later in the Quickstart section.

Syntax Highlighting

Kile is similar to programs that deal with source code and editing and will automatically highlight commands, options and items that are misused. Just like your word processor that highlights or underlines problem areas of your document, Kile has a similar feature for the LaTeX, HTML, C, C++, SQL and many other languages. It will highlight areas that it believes are problems as a warning to a user that segments of text need to be addressed.

Auto-completion of environments

New to this version of Kile is the auto-completion of environments, this means that when a user begins a new environment by typing for example: \begin{environment} Kile will automatically add a \end{environment} command, with a line in between for your text.

Jump to sections

Sections are commands that allow a user to produce a division similar to those found in books or outlines and allow the author to create a hierarchy for their documentation. Kile allows users to break up documents into the following hierarchy (part being the highest in the hierarchy and subparagraph being the lowest)

  • \parts

  • \chapter

  • \section

  • \subsection

  • \subsubsection

  • \paragraph

  • \subparagraph

When viewing a document in the structure view, the user can jump between sections by clicking on the section they would like to view.

Inverse search

When creating your own LaTeX file, inverse search can be very helpful. Once a user has created a DVI file (Device Independent File). When the user clicks the middle- mouse button in the DVI viewer, Kile will jump to the corresponding line in the LaTeX source code.

Definition of DVI: A DVI is a type of file containing a description of a formatted document, along with other information including character font, and is the usual output of Tex/LaTeX. A number of utilties exist to view and print DVI files on various systems and devices. A DVI file is sometimes also known as a metafile.

Forward search

When using inverse search, the selection of items in the DVI file is associated with the editor, so when you click on the DVI file, the main window jumps to the corresponding section of LaTeX code in the editor. Forward search is the exact opposite of this. Forward search will allow a user to click on a specific section of text in the LaTeX code, and jump to the associated position in the DVI viewer window.

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