[OS X TeX] Re: MacOSX-TeX Digest, Vol 4, Issue 8

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 9 févr. 08 à 10:55, Éric DÉTREZ a écrit :

> Le 8 févr. 08 à 21:00, Bruno Voisin a écrit :
>>
>
>> Remarks and questions:
>>
>> - OS X Textures (Textures 2.2) is alive <http://www.bluesky.com/news/220b.html
>> . It doesn't have yet all the functionality of Classic Textures
>> (Textures 2.1), but is progressing.
>
> It seems you've tried it.
> Is it worth the money ?
> There is no screenshot nor trial version on the site.
>
> I used Texture before but I didn't upgrade to version 2.1.

Hi (ou plutôt bonjour),

Whether it's worth or not depend on your criteria. A number of things  
are still not functional, such as:

- Hyperlinking (the hyperref package).

- Direct use of OS X fonts (ie the fonts appearing in Font Book).

- Search/replace in the Edit window (though I've got an experimental  
build with basic Find functionality, which does work).

- Continuous scrolling in the View window.

- Up-to-date LaTeX distribution.

There are also things you might miss if you're accustomed to TeXShop  
for example: syntax coloring, LaTeX palette and the like, use of UTF-8  
in the editor, maybe other things I'm forgetting. But personally I  
consider these things to some extent as dispensable candy (apart from  
syntax coloring and UTF-8 input), and I'm glad to be back to the  
elegance and simplicity of the Textures GUI.

And above everything there is Flash Mode: I never really used it with  
Mac OS 9 and before, before it was so slow and resource-consuming. But  
now with OS X and Intel macs it's really a joy to use, the typeset  
output appears almost instantaneously in the View window, it feels  
almost like WYSIWYG.

Moreover, it's possible to set Textures up so that it uses all or part  
of MacTeX's TeXLive tree, and to compile custom formats with it (I've  
compiled a format with French hyphenation included). I won't be able  
to provide any help on that, sorry, no time.

Regarding screenshots, here's one at <http://homepage.mac.com/bvoisin/.cv/bvoisin/Sites/.Public/Textures-2.2.0b7.png-zip.zip 
 > (in case the URL doesn't work, you may try <http://homepage.mac.com/bvoisin/FileSharing4.html 
 > then click on the Download arrow for Textures-2.2.0b7.png). The  
included graphics are Mathematica 6 output postprocessed in  
Illustrator CS3.

Bruno Voisin