Working in Citet

PDF viewer

The embedded PDF viewer shows the compiled output alongside the source. It supports text search, zoom, and bidirectional navigation between the PDF and the corresponding source line via SyncTeX.

Page navigation

Use the arrow buttons in the viewer toolbar to step through pages, or click the page number field and type a destination directly. The viewer jumps to that page immediately.

Zoom

The toolbar has zoom-in and zoom-out buttons and a preset list: 50 %, 75 %, 100 %, 125 %, 150 %, 200 %, 250 %, and 300 %. You can also type a percentage directly into the zoom field.

→Fit width: scales the PDF so its full width fills the viewer panel. Useful for narrow panels or wide-format pages.
→Fit height: scales the PDF so the full height of one page is visible at once.

Text search

Press Ctrl+F inside the PDF viewer to open the search bar. Type your query and press Enter to jump to the next match, or Shift+Enter to go to the previous one. The total match count is shown while the search bar is open. Press Escape to close it.

Matches are highlighted across all pages. Searching works against the PDF text layer from the last successful compile — it does not require recompiling.

SyncTeX — jumping between source and output

SyncTeX connects positions in the compiled PDF to lines in the LaTeX source, and vice versa. It makes navigating long documents much faster than scrolling.

→PDF → editor: hold ⌘ / Ctrl and click anywhere in the PDF. The editor scrolls to and highlights the source line that produced that output.
→Editor → PDF: use the command palette (⌘K / Ctrl+K) and choose the jump-to-PDF command. The viewer scrolls to the position corresponding to the cursor's current line.

SyncTeX works for paragraphs, equations, figure captions, and table entries. It does not work perfectly for content generated entirely by a macro — for example, a table-of-contents entry points to the \tableofcontents command, not to the section heading it links to.

▶How SyncTeX works

SyncTeX is built on every compile by passing -synctex=1 to pdflatex, or via Tectonic's built-in support. The resulting .synctex file maps character offsets and bounding boxes in the PDF to source file paths and line numbers.

The SyncTeX file is stored in S3 alongside the PDF artifact after each successful compile. When you request a jump (click in PDF or command palette), the server parses the SyncTeX file and returns the target source coordinates. The browser then scrolls the corresponding panel.

SyncTeX data is keyed to a specific compile. If you edit the source after compiling but before jumping, the line numbers may be off by a few lines. Recompiling brings them back into sync.

Download

The toolbar's download button saves the PDF from the last successful compile to your local machine. If you have made edits since the last compile, compile first to get an up-to-date PDF.