Some TeX Developments

There was an interesting e-mail to the TeXworks mailing list today. Laurence Field has made a build of TeXworks available as an “Application Bundle”, a pre-built drop-and-drag method for installing across Linux distributions. The idea is to make life as easy for Linux users as those on Macs (where the same drag-and-drop method is very common). Hopefully, this will help lower the entry barrier that bit further!

A quick note to say that MiKTeX 2.8 was released on Tuesday. As I’ve already posted, the two points to note in the new version are the inclusion of TeXworks and better support for multi-user systems. There seem to be one or two teething issues, but I’m sure they’ll soon be solved.

As siunitx has grown I’ve got a steady stream of requests for improvements or bug fixes. To date, I’ve done all of this purely by e-mail, but it seems to me that it would be helpful all round if there was some public information available. I’ve therefore added the feature requests and bugs currently in my inbox to the trackers on the BerliOS page for siunitx. I’ll add more as they occur to me, and I guess I should also do something about getting a proper homepage sorted out! Please feel free to either e-mail me or add stuff to the trackers: I’ll read and work on it in either case.

I’m working on version 2 of siunitx, and the current plan is that most changes will be made in that code. So you’ll see that I may well comment that things are done in the new version. There is still lots to do, I’m afraid, but I am working on it and expect to deliver! A lot of the easier stuff is done, such as getting better internal data structures. There is still quite a lot of hard work, though, as I need to do things like decide how to sort out the various table-based feature requests.