[OS X TeX] Simple-minded MacTeX/TeXShop Question

[Alain Schremmer]

On Nov 12, 2007, at 1:59 AM, Louis Talman wrote:

> I've been following...
>
> Well, trying to follow...
>
> the discussion of what happens when you upgrade from Tiger to  
> Leopard.  I use plain vanilla MacTeX with TeXShop, all pretty much  
> with default settings that produce nice PDFs with LaTeX.  (At  
> least, *I* like those PDFs.)  About all I want to accomplish is  
> producing some fairly plain vanilla documents with some pretty  
> ordinary mathematics, mostly at the undergraduate level, in them.
>
> I can't figure out from what I've read here whether or not I'm  
> asking for trouble if I upgrade from Tiger to Leopard.  Does anyone  
> know?

In that same position, I asked myself "What's in it for me?" to which  
the answer was "I am fine as is"

(Of course, back in the days of the 250 Mac, I was also fine as is.  
In fact, it was nirvana and, a bit later, I had to think long and  
hard before deciding to buy the 20 Meg hard disc—and, no, I don't  
want to remember how much it all cost.)

For the systems, and almost from the beginning, my "policy" has been  
to remain one system behind and upgrade only when about to be two  
systems behind and so I don't even have to think about it. It has  
worked very well for me. For software in general, my "policy" has  
been generally the same but I have had to make allowances for  
particularly good upgrades or spectacularly bad versions.

For the hardware, things are a bit more complicated policy-wise. For  
instance, while I am still running an otherwise perfectly  
satisfactory 1GHz G4, I am beginning to dream of something a bit  
faster because, if LaTeX is fast enough, the magnum opus includes a  
lot of pdf figures and searching for all these pdf is beginning to  
slow typesetting quite a bit (4:25 versus 13 seconds without  
figures). But since I am mostly typesetting chapters one at a time …

Regards
--schremmer