TeXlipse for LaTeX documents

If you are already an Eclipse user or are just looking for an IDE to use for editing LaTeX files, you can use the excellent TeXlipse plugin to edit LaTeX files.

See the provided help on how to set it up. Some useful features:

• edit LaTeX using familiar features from my favorite IDE such as Subversion support
• this includes the Problems view to locate errors and warnings
• whenever you save a .tex file your document is automatically built
• the document can be directly opened with the ctrl+4 keyboard shortcut
• auto completion of common LaTeX commands
• no more mess inside your LaTeX source files directory: you can specify a separate tmp directory for generated files from LaTeX generated files which can be cleaned up using Project -> clean. (when using Subversion, you can add the generated files to svn:ignore)
• outline of your document structure for quick navigation
• easily insert LaTeX Symbols from the menu

I rarely use this last feature and the only thing I find lacking is the ability to quickly insert commands for creating a figure or table. (Note that for easily creating tables there are macro's for converting OpenOffice Calc or M$ Excel tables to LaTeX.)

Solving BibTeX problems

For including citations to scientific papers I use the excellent BibTeX system. With google scholar you can find almost any scientific publication and use it to copy/paste its BibTeX entry. Be sure to enable this option in Scholar's preferences.

Unfortunately I encountered one problem: BibTeX didn't run at all and it kept showing warnings about missing citations. Others have gotten it to work but kept having these warnings, as mentioned on this forum.
Here I also found the solution: install a "daily build" (which currently is from back in May 2009) from the Eclipse update site:

http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/daily/

After this it works perfectly for me.