X-Symbol for WYSIWYG in Emacs

When you edit LaTeX, HTML, BibTeX or TeXinfo sources in Emacs, package X-Symbol provides some kind of WYSIWYG by using real characters for tokens like \oplus or ™. It also provides various input methods to insert these characters. Thumbnails for included images and real super-/subscripts and are also supported.

• X-Symbol provides a minor mode which make use of characters in the Latin-1, Latin-2, Latin-3, Latin-5, and Latin-9 font (179 chars + 294 char aliases), the Adobe symbol font (109 chars) and the xsymb1 font (165 chars, distributed with the package). Additional fonts could be used easily.
• These characters are used in the buffer to represent tokens (e.g., TeX macros, SGML entities, more "token languages" could be added easily) in the file. The conversion is done automatically when visiting the file, saving the buffer and turning the minor mode on/off.
• Defines 8 input methods for these characters: Menu, Grid (selecting a character with the mouse), Keyboard, Context (replace/modify similar-looking char sequence), Electric (automatic replace), Quail (a Mule input method), Token (replace token by corresponding char), Read Token (completing minibuffer input of token).
• Offers some info in the echo area for these characters (e.g., that the character under point represents the TeX macro \leadsto and that the macro is defined in LaTeX package `latexsym.sty').
• Allows to use a 8bit file encoding which is different from your "normal" 8bit file encoding, e.g., you can visit TeX files with \usepackage[latin5]{inputenc} even if you normally use a Latin-2 font.
• Provides a kind of "poor man's Mule" when running on an XEmacs without Mule support: it can display more than 256 characters via font-lock and removes most annoyances resulting from the fact that, without Mule support, many "X-Symbol characters" are actually a sequence of two chars.
• Provides fonts for single-line innermost super- and subscripts to be displayed with per-buffer control. The invisible part, like <sub> in HTML, is revealed at point.
• Displays thumbnails for images at the end of image insertion commands with per-buffer control (e.g., \includegraphics{file} in LaTeX, <img src=file> in HTML). They show a scaled-down version of the included image files (using convert from ImageMagick). A single mouse click on the image or command invokes the image editor for the corresponding image file.
• It does not and will not provide commands to hide (more or less) uninteresting parts of your document or fontify them differently. This is more the task of the corresponding major mode or font-lock, e.g., font-latex. (I admit, the support of super- and subscripts might let you think that this is a good point for the todo list of package X-Symbol.)

Read some notes on related programs and Emacs packages like Lyx, preview-latex and WhizzyTeX. Check the details (page includes screenshots) on conversion, input methods and image thumbnails. Check the manual for in-depth information. Check the news for the newest version number, recent changes and installation instructions. At SourceForge.net, check the project summary and download the package.

You might want to try some other Emacs packages I have written: ANTLR-Mode, Session and Template.