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Setting up development environment
This page contains instructions, that will help you prepare the development environment. It will guide you through installation of the required tools, starting the application and contributing to the project.
The code repository is located on GitHub - a powerful service that offers space for project, issue management, wiki you are currently reading and a lot of other useful stuff for software projects. Head to https://github.com/ and click sign up, if you don't have an account yet.
Git is an application that provides revision control, which is especially useful while working on a project with many contributors. You will need Git to get your local copy of the repository and to submit changes to the project. Get Git at https://git-scm.com/downloads
NetBeans is one of the most popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the world. It provides an editor with syntax highlight, code completion, ability to run and debug projects and more. Open LaTeX Studio is built using the NetBeans Platform framework - the same one that is used for the NetBeans IDE. For this reason, the NetBeans IDE provides a lot of tools, that make developing NetBeans platform based applications easier to develop. Therefore, we highly recommend using NetBeans IDE (in version 8.1) to develop the application. You can get NetBeans at: https://netbeans.org/downloads/
Now that you have all tools, it is time to download the source code of the project and get your hands dirty! There are various methods of doing, however if you have never made a local copy of the repository, here is one of the ways. Open GitBash (should get installed with Git on Windows; On Linux - simply use your terminal). Navigate to the directory you wish to place the project in and paste this command:
git clone https://github.com/sebbrudzinski/Open-LaTeX-Studio.git
This will create a new directory, called Open-LaTeX-Studio, place all the project files there and initialize Git in that directory. Please note, that you will not be able to submit changes directly to this code repository. Therefore, if you plan to submit any changes, please first fork the repository (click "Fork" on the project page). Fork will create an exact copy of the repository on your GitHub account (to which you can submit changes, since it's yours). Instead of the cloning the main repository, clone your fork of the repository:
git clone https://github.com/<your_user_name>/Open-LaTeX-Studio.git
After cloning, the filestructure will look like this in Explorer:
Open NetBeans IDE and in the menu select File, Open project. Navigate to the directory, where you placed your local copy of the repository and select the project to open it in NetBeans. Make sure when opening the project, the Open Required Projects option is checked
Once it gets loaded, you can view the project structure tree and all the files. NetBeans will indicate that it can prime build the application or you can start the prime build yourself. It will download all necessary stuff. The end result should look like this:
Before you can submit any change, you will naturally have to find something to work on. A list of currently open issues can be found at https://github.com/sebbrudzinski/Open-LaTeX-Studio/issues If you find something interesting, that is not yet taken, please leave a comment in the issue that you are planning to work on this. We strongly recommend starting with issues marked "Community friendly". If you have no idea which issue to work on, let us know and we can point something to work on. As mentioned earlier, you will only be able to submit changes to your own fork of the repository. Once you have managed to resolve the issue, push the changes to your fork of the repository and create pull request on GitHub. The change will get reviewed and if it indeed resolves the issue and meets quality standards, it will get merged to the project codebase.
There is a known issue that changes are not visible in the application after you've changed the code and rebuilt it. You can fix this by running the clean task. Right-click the root project and choose "Clean". Then build the application again and run it. Now changes should be visible.
LaTeX is not required to start the application, although its abilities will be limited to using the editor. To be able to generate PDF files and see preview of the documents, you must install LaTeX.
If you have no idea where to get LaTeX or which distribution to choose, here are the examples:
- Windows: http://miktex.org/download
- Windows: https://www.tug.org/protext/
- Linux (Debian/Ubuntu): sudo apt-get install texlive
- Linux (CentOS/RedHat): sudo yum install tetex
Don't forget to set the path to your LaTeX distribution in the application settings of Open LaTeX Studio (use Tools -> Options).
In the example below MikTeX for 64-bits Windows was installed, the distribution path then should be set to
[Install Path]\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\x64. If the [Install Path] is c:\program files it looks like this:
Use the Generate PDF button to see whether the distribution path has been set to the right path.