Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code supports editing, building and previewing the output document all in the same editor window. This may be achieved using a bare bones approach (defining run configurations) or using the extension https://github.com/James-Yu/LaTeX-Workshop. In this page we will only focus on the usage of LaTeX-Workshop extension.

Requirements (2022/01/24)

Please refer to the extensions Install page for an up to date list of requirements.

• LaTeX distribution in system PATH. The extension recommends TeX Live but MiKTeX is also supported. Other distributions may also be supported, however the extension page does not mention them. For details on how to install LaTeX please refer to Installing LaTeX.
  • If using MiKTeX you are required to install Perl. This is because the default compilation uses latexmk which has as a dependency Perl.
  • You need to restart Visual Studio Code after defining the desired LaTeX distribution in the system PATH.
• Install the LaTeX Workshop extension in Visual Studio Code
  • After installation you will have a new TeX sidebar.

Usage

The typical usage is to open a .tex file and then in TeX sidebar you will have the option to build the file. For previewing the output document, all you have to do is click on the preview button at the top right corner of the Visual Studio Code Window.

For more specific use cases or detailed explanation of the options available please refer to the page extension Wiki page

Spell check

Visual studio code does not provide spell check right out of the box for .tex files. You may add it by installing Code Spell Checker extension. By default the extension is bundled with en-US and en-GB languages but other languages are also supported.