[OS X TeX] LinkBack/LaTeX on Mac OS X Feedback

[Simon Spiegel]

Hi,

On 06.02.2007, at 18:34, King Chung Huang wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm the author of the Keynote LinkBack Plugin. I'm posting here  
> because a very large number of the plugin's users appear to use it  
> in conjunction with LinkBack aware LaTeX applications, and a good  
> portion of them also appear to be in educational institutions. One  
> of my many hats is as a member of the steering committee of the  
> MacLearning group. We have an annual meeting to provide feedback  
> directly to the engineers, product marketers, and others behind  
> Apple's products.
>
> I am in the process of preparing my requests for this year's agenda  
> items. I am interested in finding out if the Mac LaTeX users here  
> would be interested in seeing Apple doing something with LaTeX in  
> Mac OS X, or would you rather Apple leave it alone and defer to the  
> current community-based efforts? The "something" could mean  
> anything from simply including LaTeX in Mac OS X, to integration  
> with the text system. If there is interest in some sort of activity  
> from Apple, I will make a request to talk about this on this year's  
> agenda. And, if it makes it onto the agenda, I will post back with  
> questions on this list to get more specific information to present  
> to Apple.

This sounds certainly interesting. I'm only an interested user, so my  
opinion may not be identical to those who actually develop LaTeX  
stuff for the Mac. So if anyone differs with the following, feel free  
to disagree.

I think bundling a TeX distribution with OSX would certainly be a  
Good Thing and it wouldn't even need great engineering efforts by  
Apple. Shipping OSX with the latest incarnation of TeX Live would  
definitely lower the hurdles for people trying TeX on OSX. and would  
mainly require some (re-)packaging. I guess Apple isn't really  
interested in coming up with their own distribution, but they could  
take over where Gerben left it. Another approach would be to include  
MikTeX (which already runs on OSX) and design a nice OSX GUI for it.  
I have no ideas if there are any licensing issues, but if they  
shipped OSX with a LaTeX distribution, including graphical frontends  
like TeXShop or BibDesk would definitely make sense.


On a more general level: Bruce d'Arcus has been thinking about a  
system wide citation service (http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/ 
darcusb/archives/2006/10/23/system-level-citation-services ). Such a  
thing would definitely make a lot of sense to many of us, but I guess  
that's too late in the game for Leopard (and definitely not something  
Apple will do unless Pages supports it).

I guess people like Dick Koch or Adam Maxwell can say more specific  
things about what they need, but better/more extended APIs for PDF   
access (and metadata) is certainly always welcome.

simon

--
Simon Spiegel
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