Learn FlashPaper

Flashpaper is a desktop app for writing academic papers. You write in a page-like editor; FlashPaper produces the LaTeX for you and shows the typeset PDF beside your text.

New here? Install Flashpaper first. After installing you land on Home, the list of your papers, with search. Create one with New paper or Ctrl + N, pick a template, and start typing.

The first PDF build downloads the LaTeX packages it needs, so connect to the internet once. Each new template's packages are fetched the first time you use it; after that builds use the local cache.

Write headings, paragraphs and lists, with bold, italic and code. There are four heading levels — section, subsection, subsubsection and paragraph title (Ctrl + 1 to Ctrl + 4) — numbered the way your template prints them.

Type / at the start of an empty line to open the insert menu for figures, tables, charts and equations. Zoom the paper with Ctrl + scroll, pinch, Ctrl + = / Ctrl + −, or the toolbar control; Ctrl + 0 resets it.

The title, 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 — so you fill them in once.

• In an e-mail field, Enter goes to the next author or adds a new one, and Shift + Enter jumps to the abstract.
• In the abstract, Enter jumps to the keywords; Esc discards the keyword you are typing.

Choose, drop or paste any image — PNG, JPG and PDF are used as they are; WebP, SVG and GIF are converted. Resize a figure, and in two-column styles turn on Full width to span both columns.

Add and remove rows and columns, mark header rows, merge cells and set alignment per column. Tables are typeset with booktabs rules and shrunk to fit narrow columns.

Make a bar, line or scatterchart from a small spreadsheet — paste straight from Excel or Google Sheets. Charts are typeset natively with pgfplots, so they use the paper's own fonts.

A visual equation editor: type a/b, sqrt or alpha and it becomes math. Equations can be numbered or unnumbered, and you can also write inline math in a sentence. Math is checked against an allowlist, so an equation can never break the build.

Refer to a figure, table, equation or section and FlashPaper numbers it live — “Fig. 2”, “Table II”, “(3)”, “Section III-A” — exactly as the PDF will, renumbering as things move. The wording and numbering style follow the template.

The gallery holds 88 templates, searchable and previewed by typesetting a sample in the real engine. Switching template never changes your text.

• Engineering & CS19
• Machine learning & AI12
• Physical sciences14
• Life & medical sciences5
• Mathematics3
• Humanities & social sciences5
• Journals & publishers22
• Theses & reports2
• General & preprints6

Officialtemplates use the publisher's own LaTeX class, shipped with TeX distributions or included with FlashPaper where the licence allows. Look-aliketemplates reproduce a venue's layout where the official files can't be redistributed — fine for drafting, but use the venue's own kit for the final submission.

The PDF beside your text rebuilds in the background as you write; a newer edit cancels the build in progress, and pages swap in one by one so the preview never blanks. Press Ctrl + S to rebuild now, and Ctrl + P to show or hide the preview. Drag the divider to resize the panes.

If a build fails you get a plain-language message. The raw engine log is available under Details if you need it.

Import as a new paperfrom Home. You see what was found, and what didn't come across, before anything is created.

• Markdown — headings, lists, tables, images and math.
• LaTeX — a .tex file, or an Overleaf / arXiv .zip with its images. The document class picks the matching template.
• PDF — text, headings, lists, tables and pictures are reconstructed.

Importing is a best-effort, one-way conversion of someone else's file; the import report lists anything that was lost.

Press Ctrl + Shift + E for the export dialog, or Ctrl + Shift + P to save the PDF straight to your Downloads folder. Files are never overwritten.

• PDF — the typeset paper.
• LaTeX project — a .zip with main.tex, the template files and your images. It compiles unchanged on Overleaf.
• Markdown — with $math$, tables and images.

Everything is local; nothing is sent anywhere. By default each paper is a folder in Documents\FlashPaper:

Documents\FlashPaper\<id>\
  document.json   the paper itself (the source of truth)
  assets\         your images
  build\          generated main.tex, main.pdf and engine logs

Back a paper up by copying its folder. Exports go to your Downloads folder.

Three environment variables change the defaults:

• FLASHPAPER_HOME — where papers are stored.
• FLASHPAPER_DOWNLOADS — where exports are saved.
• FLASHPAPER_TECTONIC — use this Tectonic executable instead of the bundled one.

These are 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