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Features

A visual editor for papers, LaTeX under the hood

FlashPaper turns what you write into publication-quality LaTeX in your journal's style. Here's everything it can do today — and what isn't there yet.

Write

A page-like editor where you never see or write LaTeX.

Visual editor
Headings, paragraphs, lists, bold, italic and code in a page-like editor. Type / on an empty line for the insert menu.
Front matter on the page
Authors (with affiliation and e-mail), abstract and keywords sit on the page. Each template typesets them its own way — IEEE author blocks, ACM's author grid, Elsevier's numbered addresses.
Four heading levels
Section, subsection, subsubsection and paragraph title, with the numbering style your chosen template prints.
Zoom
Zoom the paper with Ctrl + scroll, pinch or the toolbar control, without reflowing your layout.

Figures, tables, charts & equations

Everything a paper needs, formatted the way each venue wants it.

Figures
Choose, drop or paste any image (PNG, JPG, PDF; WebP, SVG and GIF are converted). Resize, and in two-column styles make a figure span both columns.
Tables
Add and remove rows and columns, header rows, merged cells and per-column alignment. Typeset with booktabs rules and shrunk to fit narrow columns.
Charts
Bar, line or scatter charts from a small spreadsheet you can paste from Excel or Sheets. Typeset natively with pgfplots, so they use the paper's fonts.
Equations
A visual equation editor: type a/b, sqrt or alpha. Numbered or unnumbered, plus inline math.
Live cross-references
“see Fig. 2”, “Table II”, “(3)”, “Section III-A” — numbered in the editor exactly as in the PDF, and renumbered as things move.

Templates

88 journal, conference and thesis styles. Switching never touches your text.

Searchable gallery
Browse by field — engineering, machine learning, physical and life sciences, mathematics, humanities, publishers, theses — with a live preview typeset in the real engine.
Official styles
IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier, APS, AIP, ACS, AMS, APA and more use the publisher's own LaTeX class.
Look-alikes, labelled honestly
Where a venue's files can't be redistributed (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, Nature, Science…), a clean-room look-alike reproduces the layout. Fine for drafting; use the venue's kit for the final submission.
Two-column done right
Column count, table numbering and figure placement follow the template, including full-width floats in two-column layouts.

Live preview

The PDF beside your text re-typesets in the chosen style.

Built-in LaTeX engine
FlashPaper ships Tectonic, so there is nothing to install. The first build downloads the LaTeX packages it needs once; after that builds use the local cache.
Always up to date
Builds run in the background; a newer edit cancels the stale build, and the preview swaps page by page so it never blanks while you type.
Friendly errors
When a build fails you get a plain-language message. The raw engine log is tucked under “Details”.
Resizable panes
Drag the divider between editor and preview, or focus it and use the arrow keys.

Import & export

Bring work in, take LaTeX out — you are never locked in.

Export a PDF
Straight to your Downloads folder, never overwriting an existing file.
Export a LaTeX project
A .zip with main.tex, the template files and your images. It compiles unchanged on Overleaf.
Export Markdown
With $math$, tables and images.
Import Markdown, LaTeX or PDF
A .tex file or an Overleaf/arXiv .zip (the document class picks the matching template), or a PDF whose text, headings, lists, tables and pictures are reconstructed. You see what was found, and what didn't come across, before anything is created.

Private & local

Your papers never leave your computer.

No account, no cloud
Nothing is sent anywhere. Each paper is a folder on your disk.
An open file format
document.json is the single source of truth for each paper; the LaTeX is generated from it, so what you see is what you export.
Safe by design
Everything you type reaches LaTeX through an escaping layer, and math is checked against an allowlist, so a stray character can't break your build.

Not yet

On the roadmap, but not in the app today.

  • Citations and bibliography (.bib import, citation picker, DOI lookup)
  • Footnotes, links, underline and strikethrough
  • DOCX and HTML export
  • A submission checker and a blind-review toggle (anonymous-review templates already exist)

Ready to write your next paper?

Download FlashPaper for Windows and try it on a real draft — your work stays on your computer.

Installer coming soonRead the docs