Some TeX Developments

As many readers will know, the TeXworks project aims to provide a cross-platform TeX editor. A key requirement for that is that end-users can get a working version of the code. On Windows, that’s not too bad as the main developers provide pre-build binaries with reasonable frequency. On Linux, there are a number of pre-built versions available for different distros, and building from the source tends to be a case of following a recipe. That leaves Mac OS X, where life has been awkward for a while. Luckily, after a period where not much happened there are now some experienced people looking at this. Charlie Sharpsteen seems to be getting on well with sorting out the issues, and has just posted builds for Snow Leopard and for Leopard for the current development code. For me, these look good, so we’re hopefully in a position where TeXworks on the Mac continues to grow.

The new TeXworks release adds a new ‘magic comment’ to the set that the program knows. So I thought it might be useful to have a list of those that currently work, and a typical setting for each one.

% !TeX program = LuaLaTeX

The name of the typesetting engine to use for the current file, which should be one of the engines that is set up for use with TeXworks. This is useful if you normally use one engine (for example pdfLaTeX), but have a few files that need an alternative engine. In my example, the file would automatically use LuaLaTeX as the engine.

% !TeX encoding = UTF-8

Sets the file encoding for the current file. The usual default is UTF-8, but this setting is handy if you need to collaborate with other people using non-UTF-8 editors.

% !TeX root = somefile.tex

Indicates that the current file is not the main file for typesetting: when you choose to typeset, TeXworks will save the current file then typeset the master file. Using this setting, you need the full name of the master file including the extension. This is clearly a handy setting for larger projects, where you might have a lot of files which are to be included in one master document.

% !TeX spellcheck = de-DE

Specify the spell check language for the current file. This is a new setting in v0.4.0 (it was not present in the 0.2 stable release). The language of course needs to be one you have installed!

One point to notice with the root setting is how it interacts with program. Let’s imagine that the master file needs to be typeset using LuaLaTeX, and that your default engine is pdfLaTeX. You then need to include the program in each subsidiary file to get everything to work properly:

% !TeX root    = master.tex
% !TeX program = LuaLaTeX

If you don’t do that, when you try to typeset from one of the subfiles then TeXworks will use the currently-selected engine (probably pdfLaTeX) and not LuaLaTeX for the typesetting. Once you know, this is not so surprising, but at first it caught me out!

I posted yesterday that v0.4.0 of TeXworks has been released: this marks a new stable branch in the code. I also pointed out that there are official Windows and Ubuntu builds. I’m now pleased to see that there is also an unofficial build for the Mac, at least for 64-bit Intel systems (like mine!). Thanks to Jjgod Jiang for doing this: I’ve posted before about the issues building TeXworks on the Mac. So I’m now happily using the first new Mac build for over a year.

Stefan Löffler has posted to the TeXworks mailing list the following:

Windows binaries and a source code bundle have been uploaded to GC, and Ubuntu packages are currently building (see https://launchpad.net/~texworks/+archive/stable/+packages). The web page (http://www.tug.org/texworks/) will be updated soon (just waiting for a routine pull from the GC repository). For a quick overview over the most important changes, please have a look at http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/browse/tags/release-0.4.0/NEWS

This is very much evolution in TeXworks development: I’ve been using the unstable builds for some time with no serious issues, and doubt that will change much with the release of v0.4.0. I’ve quickly tested the Windows builds, and have also done a quick build on Ubuntu (see the screenshots). You will see that Mac OS X builds are currently missing: getting them working is currently proving to be something of a difficult task. So for the moment, on the Mac you have to stay with older (but quite usable) builds.

Development of TeXworks has picked up over the last couple of months, with a drive to get to version 0.4. Several builds for Windows have been posted on the TeXworks downloads page, so testing there has been pretty easy. For Linux users, the instructions for building from source are not too bad, so anyone wanting to test on Linux has also been okay. However, Mac users face more a more difficult time. The last official binaries were posted in February 2010, and most Mac users don’t build software from the sources.

There was a post to the TeXworks mailing list yesterday asking for volunteers to get Mac binaries sorted out. This will not be a trivial process: Mac OS X is used on PowerPC and Intel chips, and the later covers both 32- and 64-bit cases. However, the aim has to be first to solve the more basic problem of getting the software to build at all! Bruno Voisin has managed that, but this is a test case and not really suitable for distribution.

As I’ve got a Mac, I’m having a go at solving some of the problems, but my experience with serious programming is pretty much non-existent, so whether I’ll be much help I’m not sure. So any keen TeX-using Mac programmers reading might want to take a look at the discussion and make suggestions (or of course provide some binaries and build instructions!).

Progress toward the next stepping stone in the TeXworks schedule, release 0.4, is ongoing. To help get the new code tested for this, an experimental build has been added to the download page for users on Windows. For people on Linux, it’s usually possible to build the program from the source without too much hassle, so they can hep to test out too.

I see on the TeXworks mailing list that Jonathan Kew has posted new builds of the ‘bleeding edge’ experimental code. For those of us who use them (and find them pretty stable) this will add a number of refinements, from the look of the change log.

Jonathan Kew has posted new ‘snapshots’ for the experimental (v0.3) trunk of TeXworks. As usual, these are for Windows and the Mac, with Linux users to compile themselves from the SVN (not usually difficult). Looking through the change list, it looks like mainly small refinements rather than any big changes. Everything looks like it’s working, which is the main thing!

The current experimental builds of TeXworks now include the ability to alter the background colour of text, as well as the foreground. At the moment, you can’t do this in an additive fashion (varying the two independently). However, it does make it easy to have something a bit nicer than the default bright red for comments. I’ve altered my syntax-patterns.txt file for LaTeX to read

[LaTeX]
# special characters
darkred		N	[$#^_{}&]

# LaTeX environments
darkgreen	N	\\(?:begin|end)\s*\{[^}]*\}

# LaTeX packages
darkblue	N	\\usepackage\s*(?:\[[^]]*\]\s*)?\{[^}]*\}

# control sequences
blue		N	\\(?:[A-Za-z@]+|.)

# comments
black/lightgrey			Y	%.*

You’ll see that the last line includes two colours, so I get black on light grey for comments.

TeXworks: Experimental LaTeX-errors interface

The latest builds of TeXworks include support for scripting. There are not a lot of scripts just yet, but one that already looks good is LaTeX error message highlighting.

This already seems to work pretty well, and it’s one of the few things I miss from my previous editor of choice (WinEdt). It can already jump to the line in question, when you choose the appropriate line in the listing.

Of course, this is only the first step in getting full scripting support for TeXworks. But things look good to me: the extra complexity to the interface is minimal, and it really opens up the possibilities for more advanced users.