eqpop

Archived. eqpop now lives inside Colophon, the macOS app in gui/ of the pdfmd repository (since Colophon 0.2.12). The same popup, the menu-bar icon, the global shortcut, the preamble and the pdfmd engine are there, and every choice is a setting (colophon settings). This repository stays for its history and is no longer developed.

A menu-bar popup that renders LaTeX (math, chemistry with mhchem, or plain text) to a tightly cropped vector PDF and puts it on the clipboard. A global hotkey (default ⌥⇧T, changeable from the menu) shows a floating window; type, watch the live preview, press ⌘↩ to copy (PDF and PNG) and the window hides, giving the focus back to the app you came from. The preview can also be dragged into Keynote, Word or Finder.

• Persistent preamble: ~/Library/Application Support/eqpop/preamble.tex. Written once on the first launch, never overwritten; edit it in the app ("Preamble…") or in any editor. Every render reads it from disk.
• Auto-crop: the engine's standalone class crops the page, then the ink is measured and the page boxes are trimmed to it (any engine's PDF gets the same treatment; the page stays vector).
• Engines: pdflatex, lualatex, xelatex, found by absolute path (a Finder-launched app has no PATH). pdflatex renders from a cached, compiled preamble (the first render after a preamble change is slower).
• Markdown through pdfmd: pick the pdfmd engine and the source is a Markdown document (math, \ce{}, tables, whatever pdfmd builds), cropped to its ink like the rest. The preamble goes to pdfmd as preamble.tex and the pane's "pdfmd metadata" tab as metadata.yaml (a pdfmd-options: block works there), so a house style applies; a second popup picks pdfmd's PDF engine (typst takes about a second, pdflatex four, lualatex ten). It never renders while typing: ⌘R or ⌘↩. The pdfmd used is $EQPOP_PDFMD, else ~/dev/py/pdfmd/pdfmd.py, else pdfmd on the path (pipx install pdfmd-cli).
• Errors: a failed render shows a table of every error (line, message, near) in place of the preview, like LaTeXiT; double-click a row to jump to the line. Log shows the full log.
• Live: the checkbox (or the menu) turns rendering-while-typing off; ⌘R renders, ⌘↩ renders and copies.
• Looks: follows the system's light or dark appearance (the preview stays a white sheet, so black text reads in both). Line numbers in both editors. The preview sits above the editor, as in LaTeXiT, or below it: the menu-bar menu and the View menu have "Preview above the editor" and "Line numbers".
• Export: Save… (⌘S) writes PDF, PNG or SVG (SVG needs pdftocairo from poppler, or mutool).

Install

Download (Apple Silicon): eqpop-<version>-macos-arm64.zip from the Releases page, unzip, move eqpop.app to ~/Applications and open it. It is not notarized, so macOS refuses it the first time: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway, or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Applications/eqpop.app. Or build it from source:

Needs macOS 13 or newer, the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) and a TeX distribution (MacTeX or BasicTeX).

git clone https://github.com/aliperdehan/eqpop.git
cd eqpop
./build.sh --install

That builds the app, copies it to ~/Applications/eqpop.app and starts it. It has no Dock icon: look for the f(x) in the menu bar, and press ⌥⇧T (or choose "Show eqpop") for the window. The menu also has "Launch at login" and "Change shortcut…". To update, git pull and run ./build.sh --install again.

For the Markdown engine install pdfmd (pipx install pdfmd-cli). For SVG export, brew install poppler (or mupdf-tools).

./build.sh alone only builds build/eqpop.app (open build/eqpop.app starts it). The app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized: built on your own machine it opens normally; a copy downloaded from somewhere else needs System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. The icon and the menu-bar glyph are set in STIX (SIL OFL, shipped with macOS).

Without the window

eqpop --render '\ce{2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O}' out.pdf [--inline|--text] [--engine lualatex] [--preamble FILE] [--png FILE]

open build/eqpop.app --args --show opens the window at launch (for testing without the hotkey).

License

MIT.