[OS X TeX] Compiling the master when hitting the compile button of the child?

[Herbert Schulz]

> On Mar 25, 2018, at 11:19 AM, David Derbes <loki at uchicago.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi, all.
> 
> For the benefit of the relative newcomers, perhaps a brief introduction to Gerben’s pioneering work to get LaTeX on Macs everywhere would be worthwhile…
> 
> Thank you, Gerben!
> 
> David Derbes
> U of Chicago Laboratory Schools
> 
> On Mar 25, 2018, at 11:08, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
> 
>>> On Mar 25, 2018, at 11:05 AM, Gary L. Gray <euler at psu.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Mar 25, 2018, at 12:00 PM, Richard Koch <koch at uoregon.edu> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Gary Gray and Herbert Schulz answered before I got a chance, so let me just say that I almost jumped out of my chair when I saw your name. In these days of tweets, social media, etc., it is nice to be reminded of the people who started all of this. 
>>> 
>>> Dick,
>>> 
>>> Same here! A notification flashed across my screen and I immediately switched to Mail to see if I read the name correctly. 😯
>>> 
>>> Gary
>> 
>> Howdy,
>> 
>> Hey... don't leave me out! :-) It's always nice to hear from folks from way back when...
>> 
>> I can't possibly forget the person who created gwtex and got me back into using TeX after quite a hiatus.
>> 
>> Good Luck,
>> 
>> Herb Schulz
>> (herbs at wideopenwest dot com)

Howdy,

I'm sure I've got more documentation about the history of TeX under OS X but can't seem to find it. I'll do my best to put a bit together for newcomers to the list but my recolection may be off by a year or two (which is a small fraction of my age so falls in the range of memory errors).

I got my first Mac laptop, a titanium PowerBook, in 2002 and made sure it was running the first release version of OS X. At the time I had moved from using Textures to a program called FrameMaker (a word processor that was designed for technical documents). That program was purchased by Adobe and they announced that they would no longer support the Mac and especially OS X so I looked around for a replacement. I found the Mac OS X TeX list (thanks to Gary Gray for supporting it for all these years) and there was talk about gwTeX, a repackaging of teTeX (by Thomas Esser) along with some additions useful for Mac folk, put together by Gerben Wierda  and distributed via iInstaller (also written by Gerben, see <http://ii2.sourceforge.net>).

Gerben spent lots of time on the Mac OS X TeX list helping folks out with TeX related questions as well as installation information. It was his ready help that got me back to using TeX (although I switched to LaTeX) and got me through the initial rough spots.

The first version of MacTeX actually installed that year's version of gwTeX (was that 2006?) but that year Thomas Esser announced he would no longer build teTeX and recommended that folks move over to TeX Live. The following year Gerben built the last version of gwTeX as a sub-set of TeX Live which was then distributed in MacTeX. The next year Gerben decided to stop distributing gwTeX and MacTeX switched to the full TeX Live distribution.

Life became more complicated and Gerben decided to take time off from his TeX work and do some ``real'' work so all of us that got so much help from started to give back a bit to the community. It's always nice when we get the occasional list item by Gerben to remind us of the ``old'' times for TeX under OS X.

I don't know if that covers much but it was definitely nice to hear from Gerben again.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)