[OS X TeX] A few basic questions

[Michael Betsch]

TexShop is primarily a frontend that calls programs and support files from
a standard TeX installation. You can in fact use all these programs from
the command line without TexShop. There are other implementations of this
frontend concept, e.g. iTeXMac; there are also add-ons for text editors
that allow you to call the programs from your texteditor. (Such add-ons
exist - among others - for BBEdit and Emacs). As the programs and support
files actually used are always the same, there is no danger in using
different frontends in turn. But you should try to understand what these
frontends actually do (in Command-Line terms). Try to process some files
from the command line, for example.

LaTeX2e: All currently available TeX implementations use this LaTeX
version. Earlier LaTeX versions are obsolete since a very long time. Some
stuff for "latex2.09" is maintained so that people will still be able to
process very old source files.

Michael Betsch


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