[OS X TeX] FlashMode, Up Close and Personal, TeX plug-in

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 13 sept. 08 à 17:16, Herbert Schulz a écrit :

> I must admit that I hardly ever used Flash Mode in TeXtures because  
> my system, a Quadra 650, seemed so slow.

Neither did I: in Mac OS Classic, on the various Macs I used (SE/30,  
IIsi, Classic II, PowerBook 540, PowerMac 8100/110, PowerBook 5300cs,  
PowerMac G4, PowerBook G4, possibly others I'm forgetting), Textures'  
Flash Mode and Synchronicity were so resource-consuming (in terms of  
RAM and CPU for Flash Mode, and disk space for Synchronicity), given  
the modest performances of those machines, that I never used them  
really.

Now on OS X Flash Mode is practically instantaneous (including on the  
MacBook I'm writing this on), so that typing in TeX feels practically  
the same as with WYSIWYG software. That may seem secondary, but it  
really feels nicer to use.

The only problem is that, in LaTeX, every \section{, \label{ or  
\ref{ command creates an error, unless you finish typing the argument  
and add the closing brace }. Originally every such error caused  
Textures' Preview to switch back to the previous page, so that after  
finishing entering the argument you had to navigate manually to the  
original page in Preview. Now they have fixed that.

> With TeXShop I just recompile (Cmd-T) whenever I want to save and  
> inspect what I've done. Nice and quick on our modern systems.

Before OS X Textures I used to do this, saving input and typesetting  
again every 30 seconds or so. That's nice and efficient, but Flash  
Mode feels even nicer.

As for Synchronicity or SyncTeX, I must admit they don't correspond to  
my use of TeX: being the single author of most of my TeX documents, I  
know generally exactly which part of the source correspond to which  
part of the preview, to the character, and I tend to navigate manually  
between one and the other.

I started experimenting with SyncTeX for testing purposes, during the  
preparation of MacTeX 2008. But I don't use it for my own documents.  
And being the Mac purist I am, I don't like having one more ancillary  
file (the .synctex.gz file) generated during TeX runs. I'm still  
hoping for a TeX wrapper (or bundle) format to arise someday, such  
that all the ancillary files (.aux, .log, ...) are hidden from the  
Finder and only appear when explicitly requested by the user through a  
GUI (such as the .log file in TeXShop's console window).

Bruno Voisin