Gummi’s been mentioned to me before, but this time I gave it a quick spin. My Ubuntu system doesn’t actually have TeX Live installed at the moment, so I went with compiling Gummi myself rather than using the prebuilt version. Everything looks okay, and in many ways similar to TeXworks. I’m not so sure about “compile as you use”, as I don’t see it working so well with big documents. (I’m also a fan of the TeXworks approach of aiming for cross-platform from the start). I’ll certainly keep an eye on Gummi: perhaps I’ll do some more testing when I update my Ubuntu installation.

Joseph

SyncTeX is nice.

It depends on what you think of as “features”. The aim of TeXworks is to have a relatively “clean” interface that newer users can get to grips with, without dropping powerful features. AUCTeX is built on emacs, which as we know is not everyone’s choice for ease of use! Remember that TeXworks is inspired by the Mac-only TeXshop programme. Emacs it is not

TeXworks doesn’t do any kind of incremental compilation. What you get is two windows, with one showing source and the other PDF output. The user decides when to compile, and the magic of SyncTeX lets you go from source to PDF or vice versa. The key point here is that this works with any TeX variant. As I understand it, AUCTeX uses preview-latex, but this is not much use for plain TeX or ConTeXt users. TeXworks is “format neutral”, with nothing in the core code which makes assumptions about which type of TeX is in use.

I think that’s why there are not “official” builds that often I get the feeling once you have a “recipe” all is well, but getting to that stage is a pain.

One of its key features, immediate preview of the document, do you know if this is implemented by incremental compiling, or by recompiling the whole doc everytime changes are saved?

Thanks. — Leo