Printing Press

Open a LaTeX or Markdown source file. Press compiles and displays it.
Built with Rust.

Contents

• Installation
• Opening a document
• Starting a document
• Editing
  • Neovim
• Versions
• Markdown
• Keys
• Settings
• Requirements
• License

Press is a macOS viewer for LaTeX and Markdown source files. Open a source file and Press compiles it, displays the result, and rebuilds it whenever you save.

• Automatic rebuilds. Press watches the source and updates the view after each save. You do not need latexmk -pvc, a watcher script, or a reload command.
• No generated files in the project. Press keeps compiled PDFs and auxiliary files in its own cache. Creating a document is the only operation that writes source files to your project folder.
• Titled snapshots. Press can store selected versions of the source and compile any of them for viewing. Press history is separate from Git and your editor's undo history.

Installation

Press is not distributed as a prebuilt download. After cloning the repository, build and install it with:

npm install
npm run install:app

These commands install Press.app in /Applications. Run them again to upgrade. The first build takes longer because it compiles the PDF renderer's C code.

To add a press command to your terminal, run:

npm run install:app -- --link

This writes a small script to ~/.local/bin/press, so you can run press paper.tex from any directory. Use the flag once.

To remove Press:

npm run uninstall:app            # the app
npm run uninstall:app -- --purge # the app and every version it stored

Without --purge, Press keeps your document history. Its storage contains the only copy of those snapshots, so purge it only when you no longer need them.

Opening a document

You can open a document in any of three ways:

• Drag a .tex or .md file onto the Press window, or use the Add button.
• press paper.tex from the terminal, if you linked the command.
• :Press from Neovim.

Give Press a file and it opens the corresponding document. Give it a folder and it lists the documents it finds, with recently used documents first.

You can open a document from any file that belongs to it. For example, running :Press while editing chapters/three.tex opens the full thesis. Press follows % !TEX root directives and the \input graph to find the document root. If a folder contains two papers, Press treats them as separate projects, with separate builds and histories.

You only need to add a document once. Press keeps it in the library after that.

Starting a document

New document can start with a blank Markdown or LaTeX file, or with one of your templates. Name the document, select a folder, and Press creates the files there and opens it.

A blank Markdown document is an empty .md file. A blank LaTeX document is a minimal article with one blank page. Both create one named file directly in the selected folder.

Press ships without templates. To create one, right-click a document in the library and choose Save as template. You can save only the main file or select files from the document tree. Press excludes build output, editor scratch files, .git, and unrelated documents. The main file is always included.

A template is a copy. Later changes to the original project do not affect it, and Press does not alter the source while saving or restoring it. Press also stores the last compiled page for the gallery card and remembers the TeX engine.

A single-file template creates one file in the selected folder. A multi-file template creates a folder named after the new document. Press refuses to overwrite an existing file or folder.

Document creation is the only feature that writes source files. Builds, snapshots, and auxiliary files stay in Press's storage.

Editing

Press is a viewer, not an editor. The Editor button runs the command you choose in Settings. Use {file} as a placeholder for the document and {dir} for its folder. If you leave the command unset, Press opens the file with the system's default application.

Press watches files directly, so it works with Vim, VS Code, Emacs, TextEdit, and background scripts without a plugin or save hook. After a change, it rebuilds the document and updates the page in place while preserving your scroll position.

Click a reference, citation, or link in the PDF to follow it. ⌘click anywhere in the PDF to see the source for that location, including the file, line number, and copyable text. This also works for saved versions whose source is no longer on disk.

Neovim

press.nvim adds a :Press command to Neovim. It sends the current file path to Press, which finds and opens the document root. The plugin locates the installed app automatically and does not require --link or configuration.

The plugin only opens documents. Press handles compilation, file watching, and reloading.

Versions

Use ⌘K to save and title a snapshot of the current document. Press never creates snapshots automatically.

The sidebar pins the working copy at the top, followed by each saved version, its age, and its build status. Select a version to read it just like the working copy. If Press has not compiled it before, it does so in the background. Press builds versions from temporary copies and writes nothing to your project folder.

Git still handles branches, merges, and remotes. Press history is a flat list of document versions stored outside the project. Press deduplicates identical content, so snapshots that use the same figures store one copy of each figure.

Press stores only the files that belong to the document: its source, figures, .bib files, and included chapters. It excludes build output, editor scratch files, .git, and unrelated documents in the same folder.

Markdown

A Markdown file uses the same viewer, file watching, and history as a LaTeX file. Press runs it through pandoc and then latexmk.

Set geometry, documentclass, fontsize, and header-includes in the document's YAML frontmatter. Press passes those values to pandoc without adding its own formatting.

One limitation: Markdown build errors identify the file but not the source line. Line numbers in the build log refer to the LaTeX generated by pandoc, not to the original Markdown, so Press does not display a potentially misleading line number.

Keys

The viewer uses zathura's keymap and supports numeric counts. For example, 12G goes to page 12, and 3j scrolls down three steps.

Key	Action
j / k	scroll down / up
h / l	scroll left / right
d / u	scroll half a page down / up
f / b / space	move one page down / up
J / K	go to the next / previous page
gg / G	go to the first / last page
12G	go to page 12
⌃o / ⌃i	go back / forward after a jump
+ / -	zoom in / out
0	use the actual page size
a / s	fit the page / page width
⌃r	toggle dark mode for the page and interface
click	follow a reference, citation, or link
⌘click	show the source for that location in the PDF
R	rebuild the selected version
⌘K	save a snapshot of the working copy
?	show this key list in the app

Requirements

• macOS
• A TeX distribution with latexmk (MacTeX, TeX Live, BasicTeX)
• pandoc, for Markdown documents only
• Node.js and Rust, to build Press

Press does not enable --shell-escape. It does warn you when a document's folder contains a .latexmkrc, which latexmk executes as Perl. Only open documents from folders you trust.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Antonio Leitao. GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. The full text is in LICENSE.

Press uses MuPDF, which is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and compiles its C code into the application. As a result, Press must be distributed under the same license.