[OS X TeX] LaTeXiT 1.2 beta

[Pierre Chatelier]

> LaTeXiT is very cool and it is invaluable with Keynote.
Thanks,

> One thing that has plagued me about it and it still seems to be a  
> problem with the most recent beta is that changes to the Default  
> Preamble don't take immediate effect. It seems that I have to quit  
> and restart LaTeXiT for them to take effect. Can this be corrected  
> for the next release?
I am surprised, since it should work. When you type in a new default  
preamble, the preamble of opened documents is not changed, since it  
could have been tuned by the user. But if you open a new document  
(Command-N), the new default preamble will be used.

Here is a crosspost with toolbox-talk, because there are some  
questions for which I would like to get the opinion of as many meople  
as possible. But if you think that such cross-post is useless, just  
tell me, I'll understand.

> [in the error manager] so if it could be reliably determine what  
> the offending token is it would be nice to see that as well.
For now, I would prefer not to. I prefer to be less precise, but  
ensure that the error-line is ok, rather than trying to deduce the  
faulty token, with the risk of getting wrong and give a bad  
indication. However, since LaTeXiT is open source and will be a  
toolbox project, if anybody has the knowledge to improve that, this  
will be no problem I think. Do you agree with this opinion ?

>  - I think I like the use of those things that look like tabs but  
> are actually buttons. The old school way would be to use radio  
> buttons, but I'm undecided if these things are actually better than  
> radio buttons.
This thing is called a "segmented control"; it was already available  
with Panther, but with Tiger, it is directly usable from  
InterfaceBuilder. At the very beginning of LaTeXiT, I was using radio  
buttons, because I did not know the existence of segmented controls.  
A friend of mine told me about that, I and find that in this context,  
it is much more beautiful.

> - Since we're talking LaTeX, it would be better to write
>    Display (\[...\])
>   because $$...$$ is, to be strict, incorrect.
> I guess this is a debatable problem. I did never use \[...\]  
> myself, since I find $$ more handy. But I am certainly not a LaTeX  
> expert. What does the majority of people expect here (this is a  
> question for the mailing list) ?
>
>   But I think users tend to know enough of what's going on to be  
> able to write   | Display | Inline | Text |
>   in those buttons and put \[...\] , etc., in a tooltip.
Here I disagree a little. For people not familiar with LaTeX's  
vocabulary, the use of the button becomes obvious. Here again, what  
do people think about that ?

> - For a future version, it'd be good to add a toolbar for the LaTexise
A toolbar ? For what purpose ?

> (don't suppose we've got enough of an anti-American majority to get  
> rid of the "z"? Can this be localised?)
Oh, do you mean that the "z" is a mistake (regardless of the fact  
that the word does no exist) ? English is not my mother language, so  
I did not pay great attention to this. It really does not distrub me  
to put an "s" instead.

> [...for the LaTexise] button as well as a button for the drawer, etc.
Do you mean, to open/close the drawers ? Oh, I understand, now :  
putting this buttons in the toolbar. Mmmh, it seems to me that my  
toolbar would be very "poor" (only two button), so it would not be  
very nice.

>  - I'm not sure if it's necessary to use \usepackage[applemac] 
> {inputenc}. For a start, I think [utf8] would be better for  
> forwards compatibility, and second -- since this thing will  
> *mostly* be used for maths, I think if people *do* want accented  
> characters then they can add this line to the preamble themselves.
Haha, you are forgetting french people like me; I do use accentuated  
characters, even in an equation label ! And [utf8] does not work,  
since the encoding of the input in the textfield is MacOS Roman.


>  - European decimal mark :) Can this be localised?
This should be... I will have a look.

>  - The cropping seems slightly over-enthusiastic. But not as bad as  
> TeX itself! For example:
> \documentclass{article}
> \begin{document}
> \parindent=0pt
> \voffset=-1in
> \hoffset=-1in
> \setbox0=\hbox{$1=3$}
> \dimen0=\ht0
> \advance\dimen0\dp0
> \pdfpageheight=\dimen0
> \pdfpagewidth=\wd0
> \shipout\box0
> \end{document}
> % (Stolen ages ago from Maarten, perhaps)
You are cheating, using Maarten's pathological latex source ( ;-) no  
offense!)
I have an immediate solution, that concerns Herbert's remark too : I  
could add a control to add some margin to the default bounding box.  
If you need great precision, it would be a textfield. On the  
contrary, it would be a slider. But it would need a re-latexisation  
(nice word). Any thoughts ?

The preview package seems to give the same results as LaTeXiT:

> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage[active,pdftex,textmath,tightpage]{preview}
> \begin{document}
> $1=3$
> \end{document}
> Is this actually what is used to generate the output? I couldn't  
> work it out from looking at the log file.
I do not use the preview package. If you want to get the generated  
files, you can look into /private/tmp/folders.[your uid]/Temporary Items
(this is under Tiger the result of NSTemporaryDirectory(). The files  
are put there.

Regards

Pierre
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