I’ve been putting off writing about Scribbler for a while because it’s really difficult to put into words properly the ideas I want to convey. I’ve become very attached to my little application since its early inception, not only because of the time I’ve spent, but also for how it has helped me find my creative side. The only reason I haven’t put screenshots up yet is because I’ve been talking with a designer about making the icons, and developing the site and brand of Espresso Served Here (need to catch myself each time I write ’severed’). They guys I’ve got to do that part of the app, which is completely beyond me, are really talented and I’m getting very excited about having all the artwork finished. As soon as it is ready, I’ll start posting screenshots.
It was writing my MSc thesis that gave me the desire to write a new LaTeX editor. I decided that I needed an app that understands how people work with large documents. Specifically, people work on projects. Each of these projects can contain many source files: LaTeX source itself, images, BibTeX files and PDFs; and Scribbler knows how to handle them all. You organise your project in Scribbler just like you’d organise your iTunes or iPhoto library, while Scribbler takes care of files on your hard drive. You can make new LaTeX and BibTeX files within Scribbler itself, or simply drag-and-drop a file from any other program to add it to your project.
When writing, having Scribbler keep track of your project soon shows its advantages over keeping each document separate. To include an image in your LaTeX source, just drop it on the text and Scribbler will write the code for you. You no longer need to care where the image file is in the filesystem, why should you?
Another plus to this approach comes when writing labels and citations. As Scribbler looks after your project it knows all the \label{} keys you’ve written and will suggest them for you when you type \ref{} (for the LaTeX-uninitiated, that makes cross-referencing very, very easy). The same works for all your citations.
One of the things I always found myself doing when writing in LaTeX was editing my images so I decided to add some image-editing functionality for common tasks. Scribbler allows you to re-colour, crop, rotate and apply filters to your images, so you only need to open up Pixelmator or Photoshop when you really need to.
I’m really looking forward to showing off Scribbler to you all, and when you use it I’m sure you’ll agree that creating beautiful LaTeX documents can be done in a beautiful environment. After all, one of the reasons we all use LaTeX is because we care about how things look. I’m working really hard on some features that will blow you away, and I’ll keep-on making it better.