Current Limitations

Note: This page has been updated to reflect the limitations of the current version 1.6.

For the next couple of months, Compositor will be a minimum viable product in many respects. But you know, you have to start somewhere, and I will try to address the most glaring issues one by one.

What follows is a list of the more basic limitations and current omissions. For a complete list of known issues and planned improvements, please check out the public roadmap.

Source Files

• Single-file documents only
  Compositor currently does not support documents built up from several source files (using \include or \import).

  For many users this may not even be a big issue, if you are fine with consolidating your multi-file document into one single file.

  Ultimately, Compositor will support multi-file documents.

• Maximum line length
  The line length in source files must not exceed 3000 characters. This is a limitation of the underlying TeX engine.

• Inline and display math environments
  Compositor cannot cope with the $...$ and $$...$$ short forms for inline and display math environments. Instead, it requires the more modern \(...\) and \[...\] forms.

  The reason is that the $ forms use the same delimiter to denote both the start and the end of the environment. When Compositor encounters a $ (or $$) in the code, it simply cannot know if that delimiter marks the start or the end of a math environment. With the \(...\) and \[...\] forms, the start and end delimiters are different, so there’s no ambiguity.

  Compositor will automatically convert any $...$ or $$...$$ environments to their corresponding \(...\) or \[...\] form when opening a document.

  The long, environment-style forms (\begin{math}...\end{math} and \begin{displaymath}...\end{displaymath}) are also fine and won’t be converted.

• Position of begin{document}
  

  In case Compositor encounters a \title, \author, or \date command before the \begin{document}, Compositor will canonicalize the source by moving them to after the \begin{document}.

• Other things inserted into the source
  

  Compositor will insert some required packages () into the document preamble if not yet present.

Packages

• No support for microtype
  The microtype package requires pdfTeX. Compositor can not support pdfTeX features because pdfTeX is licensed under the GPL.

• hyperref
  The hyperref package seems to be using a whole lot more memory than most other packages. If you’re running into out-of-memory issues while using this package, you will for now have to comment out the

  \usepackage{hyperref}
  

  line.

Fonts

• Fonts
  Compositor uses the Latin Modern fonts with the T1 font encoding. If your document doesn’t already contain them, Compositor will add

    \usepackage{lmodern}
    \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  

  commands to the document preamble. If that for some reason doesn’t work for you, please let me know.

• Limited support for additional fonts
  

  Packages that make use of virtual fonts (e.g., eulervm) or LaTeX font definition files (e.g., beton) won’t work at the moment. Please use this query to search for font-related issues on the issue tracker.

Editing

• Limits to WYSIWYG editing
  Compositor may not always be able to figure out which part in the source code produced a character or symbol in the rendered output. Any such glyphs with an unresolved source position are highlighted with a light orange background.

  For these parts of the text, WYSIWYG editing will not work as expected. The situation should improve over time, as more and more of these issues will get fixed. In the meantime, the source editor (Ctrl+S) might be a workaround for such cases.

• Appendixes and bibliographies
  There is currently no WYSIWYG support for appendixes and bibliographies.

Feedback Welcome!

Please let me know if there’s a must-have feature that is not yet on the roadmap. You can reach me at support at compositorapp dot com or via Twitter.