UX improvements

[ladyron]

New features:

• Toolbar menu at the top of the document with shortcuts to common LaTeX editing tasks
  

  • Preview Button (easier way to trigger LaTeX compilation; currently triggered by clicking 'Show LaTeX Preview' in the context menu)
  • Typeface Modifier GUI (subscript, superscript, bold, italic, underlined)
  • Text Layout Customization GUI: This feature allows the user to format a paragraphs layout (alignment for example)
  • Add plot (from list of canned tikzplots templates): simple function plot, plot from file, scatter plot, bar graphs, contour plot, parametric plot
  • Table Creation GUI (select number of rows and columns to create a table with dummy data)
  • Bullet Point and Numbered List

• Error Log Filtering options
  

• Main menu section with additional helpers

  • Constant Menu
  • Symbol Menu

• Tab-autocomplete for common LaTeX tags

Test in Binder:

About the team

This PR is implemented by Team 1318, a Georgia Tech Junior Design team.

User research

The added features were selected as a result of the user research amongst NIH community.

• People from the following fields were surveyed:
  • Software Engineering
  • Data Science
  • Cheminformatics
  • Virology
  • Drug discovery
  • Bioinformatics
  • Student

• What was the most difficult about using LaTeX?

  • The lack of the good editor
  • Memorizing settings that has not been used for long time
  • Layout
  • Formatting of things that aren't text
  • Sharing docs with colleagues
  • Lack of rich features present in MS word
  • Table generation
  • Graph creation

• Features that users would like to see within JupyterLab-LaTeX?

  • Table generator
  • Equation generation
  • Literate programming like environment (e.g., cweb)
  • Real time collaboration
  • GUI for tables and figures would be amazing
  • Easy/simple simultaneous render of formatted document and what is being typed
  • Robust templates for journals to "auto apply" pre-review AND post-review formatting required

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