The Communications of the TEX Users Group Volume 29 ... - TUG

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TEXworks: Lowering the barrier to entry Jonathan Kew 21 Ireton Court Thame OX9 3EB England jonathan@jfkew.plus.com 1 Introduction One of the most successful TEX interfaces in recent years has been Dick Koch’s award-winning TeXShop on Mac OSX. I believe a large part of its success has been due to its relative simplicity, which has invited new users to begin working with the system without baffling them with options or cluttering their screen with controls and buttons they don’t understand. Experienced users may prefer environments such as iTEXMac, AUCTEX (or on other platforms, WinEDT, Kile, TEXmaker, or many others), with more advanced editing features and project management, but the simplicity of the TeXShop model has much to recommend it for the new or occasional user. Besides the relatively “clean” interface, a second factor in TeXShop’s success is probably the use of a PDF-centric workflow, with pdfTEX as the default typesetting engine. PDF is the de facto standard for fully-formatted pages; every user knows what a PDF file is and what they can do with it. Bypassing DVI reduces the apparent complexity of the overall process, and so reduces the “intimidation factor” for a newcomer. But TeXShop is built on Mac OSX-specific technologies, and is available only to Mac users. There does not seem to be an equivalent tool available on other platforms; there are many TEX editors and environments, but none with this particular focus. The TEXworks project is an effort to build a similar TEX environment (“front end”) that will be available for all today’s major desktop operating systems —in particular, MS Windows (XP and Vista), typical GNU/Linux distributions, and other X11based systems, in addition to Mac OSX. To achieve this, TEXworks is based on crossplatform, free and open source tools and libraries. In particular, the Qt toolkit was chosen for the quality of its cross-platform user interface capabilities, with native “look and feel” for each platform being a realistic target. Qt also provides a rich application framework, facilitating the relatively rapid development of a usable product. The standard TEXworks workflow will also be PDF-centric, using pdfTEX and XE TEX as typesetting engines and generating PDF documents as the default formatted output. Although it will still be possible to configure a processing path based on DVI, newcomers to the TEX world need not be concerned with DVI at all, but can generally treat TEX as a system that goes directly from marked-up text files to ready-to-use PDF documents. TEXworks includes an integrated PDF viewer, based on the Poppler library, so there is no need to switch to an external program such as Acrobat, xpdf, etc., to view the typeset output. The integrated viewer also allows it to support source ↔ preview synchronization (e.g., control-click within the source text to locate the corresponding position in the PDF, and vice versa). This capability is based on the “SyncTEX” feature developed by Jérôme Laurens, now integrated into the XE TEX and pdfTEX engines in TEX Live 2008, MiKTEX, and other current distributions. 2 Features for initial release Figure 1 shows the current TEXworks prototype running on Windows Vista. While this is not a finished interface, it gives an impression of how the application will look. TEXworks version 0 will be an easyto-install application offering: 1. Simple (non-intimidating —this is not emacs or vi!) GUI text editor with i. Unicode support using standard OpenType fonts ii. multi-level undo/redo iii. search & replace, with (optional) regular expressions as well as simple string match iv. comment/uncomment lines, etc. v. (L A)TEX syntax coloring vi. TEX-aware spell checker vii. auto-completion for easy insertion of common commands viii. templates to provide a starting point for common document types 362 TUGboat, Volume 29 (2008), No. 3 — Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting
TEXworks: Lowering the barrier to entry Figure 1: A recent TEXworks build running on Windows Vista: source and preview windows, with the TeXShop-style magnifying glass in use. 2. Ability to run TEX on the current document to generate PDF: i. extensible set of TEX commands (with common commands such as pdftex, pdflatex, xelatex, context, etc. preconfigured) ii. also support running BibTEX, Makeindex, etc. iii. any terminal output appears in a “console” panel of the document window; automatically hidden if no errors occur iv. “root document” metadata so “Typeset” works from an \included file 3. Preview window to view the output: i. anti-aliased PDF display ii. automatically opens when TEX finishes iii. auto-refresh when re-typesetting (stay at same page/view) iv. TeXShop-like “magnifying glass” feature to examine detail in the preview v. one-click re-typesetting from either source or preview vi. source ↔ preview synchronization based on Jérôme Laurens’ SyncTEX technology 3 Current status An early TEXworks prototype was demonstrated at the BachoTEX conference (April 2008). It became more widely available (though still considered a prototype, not a finished release) when a version was posted in mid-July before the TUG 2008 conference. The current code is available as source (easy to build on typical GNU/Linux systems), and as precompiled binaries for Windows and Mac OSX. At this time, the application supports text editing and PDF viewer windows, and has the ability to run a typesetting job and refresh the output view, etc. There is not yet any documentation, and many potential “power user” features do not yet exist, but it is a usable tool in its current state. In addition to Windows (XP and Vista), it runs on Mac OSX (see figure 2) and GNU/Linux systems (figure 3). A few features remain to be implemented before a formal release of “version 0”, including “single instance” behavior, and various options for window positioning; appropriate installer packages for Mac OSX and Windows are also needed, to simplify setup. More information may be found online via the TEXworks home page at http://texworks.org/. TUGboat, Volume 29 (2008), No. 3 — Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting 363
Page 1 and 2: The Communications of the TEX Users
Page 3 and 4: TUG2008 Proceedings University Coll
Page 5 and 6: TUG 2008—program Monday, July 21
Page 7 and 8: At the reception. Around the front
Page 9 and 10: Taco Hoekwater, inside the Beamish
Page 11 and 12: Another, equally large, disadvantag
Page 13 and 14: This “saves” the original \text
Page 15: Figure 5: Macro result pushed back
Page 19 and 20: Direct and reverse synchronization
Page 21 and 22: The TEXnical terms used to describe
Page 23 and 24: 6.2 An orthogonal implementation On
Page 25 and 26: In fact, the text editors and the v
Page 27 and 28: albanian greek norwegian belarusian
Page 29 and 30: input manually, but are generated b
Page 31 and 32: 1.2 Commercially available software
Page 33 and 34: If L ATEX can fit the snippet into
Page 35 and 36: Pascal MetaPost, but using CWEB as
Page 37 and 38: The TEX-Lua mix Hans Hagen Pragma A
Page 39 and 40: \setbox0=\hbox{x}\the\wd0 In Lua we
Page 41 and 42: start.char = uc return true end end
Page 43 and 44: stream-based approach, this time th
Page 45 and 46: example is support for OpenType fon
Page 47 and 48: typesetting system is TEX [4] creat
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Page 51 and 52: the mapping file example.paraStyleN
Page 53 and 54: The second author accepts or reject
Page 55 and 56: Languages for bibliography styles J
Page 57 and 58: @STRING{srd = {Stephen Reeder Donal
Page 59 and 60: # # standard footnote format (latex
Page 61 and 62: . , \bbled \bbleds .
Page 63 and 64: Languages for bibliography styles (
Page 65 and 66: References [1] James C. Alexander:
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Vistas for TEX: liberate the typogr
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- even direct formatting instructio
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e that quick, simple and clear rend
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see that there are slight differenc
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Creating cuneiform fonts with MetaT
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Definition of encoding (Unicode) Pl
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epresentation with proper path dire
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When it came to implementing the T1
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4.3 OpenType math in new TEX engine
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However, there have always been exc
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[2] Nelson Beebe: Character set enc
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Meta-designing parameterized Arabic
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on the pen direction at each point
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% Description for isolated ’alif
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Figure 15: Tracing a word from left
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Table 1 shows the MOS scores for in
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P3 P3 P3 Q2 Q2 Q2 � � W3 W3 W3
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abridged form, it looks like this:
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with extensions is still somewhat m
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local rx, ry = second.y_coord - ty,
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\startreusableMPgraphic{name}... \s
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the macro \testengine sees two argu
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and exhyph-uk.tex, respectively. Th
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stand for markers of semiconsonants
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y finite state transducers (FSTs).
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local p = hpack(copy(h.list)) lastl
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with PDF documents. Several new tec
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Advanced features for publishing ma
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— — — — — — — — Fig
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telegraph. The relatively recent di
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1: [ type: unichar, code: 0073 ] ]
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5 Conclusions The model introduced
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4 Why TEX files and not other marku
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The galley Module or: How I Learned
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TUGboat, Volume 29 (2008), No. 3 48
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488 TUGboat, Volume 29 (2008), No.
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TUGBOAT Volume 29 (2008), No. 3 Tab
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