[Textures] The future of Textures

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 27 juin 2013 à 11:56, Reinhard Diestel <ReinhardDiestel at math.uni-hamburg.de> a écrit :

> Dr Allegra Smith, widow of the late Barry Smith, creator of Textures, has now replied to my original post in the TeX StackExchange forum, and following this we have established personal contact. This looks very promising for Textures as far as personal commitment from her side is concerned. However, things should obviously be handled with the utmost care and sensitivity.
> 
> In particular, we should let her choose with whom she would like to look into these things. She has named someone, a trusted friend and long-term companion to Barry Smith (as I understand it, also in Textures matters) whom she has suggested I might wish to meet if I were to represent any group of individuals interested in keeping Textures alive. I have agreed to this, and a first meeting has been loosely scheduled for September.
> 
> In order that this may remain a broad effort of all those interested in a future of Textures, please let me know if you'd like to join it. Would you like and be able to...
> 
> - offer qualified technical assistance at a software development level, or do you know qualified people who could do this? (The quality of any future edition of Textures is something close to her heart, so this is a serious point.)
> 
> - offer a financial contribution should there be a joint effort to buy the rights collectively?
> 
> I have also suggested to Allegra Smith that we should try to involve the TUG, which she herself mentioned. We might also look towards learned societies, such as the AMS, for support - both financially and in terms of advice on how to bring something into the public domain if even when it involves non-negligable costs.
> 
> I look forward to hearing from you,
> Reinhard Diestel


Hi Reinhard,

Thanks for this very good mpiece of news! And to you, and Paul Campbell, for taking this matter into your hands.

From Allegra Smith's post at TeX StackExchange, it seems the person with whom she has been looking into Textures matters is Warren Leach. He used to be one of the developers at Blue Sky Research. I searched through my Textures mailbox: we were in contact once in January 1995, he was working at the time on the Textures Installer scripts.

Regarding your specific questions:

- I cannot offer technical assistance, unfortunately, as I know close to nothing on programming.

- Regarding contributing, I'd like to but that couldn't go very far, it depends of the amounts that would be implied: in the 2-, 3- or 4-figure ranges? You can contact me off-list about this if you like.

Regarding TUG, there is a special MacTeX fund (one of the choices, for example, on the donation page <https://www.tug.org/donate.html>). I'm not sure whether it's specifically dedicated to the preparation of the MacTeX distribution every year, or generally to the advancement of TeX on the Mac platform. I'm cc'ing this message to the MacTeX list (not the public "TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List", but the private, invitation-only, MacTeX list associated with the MacTeX Technical Working Group), so that people involved in such decisions can contact you directly if they see fit.

Finally, about the iPad Textures mentioned in your post and earlier in the quotation by Paul Campbell:

> Any sale would have to be subject to the usability of Barry's legacy. I had talked to Barry about the iPad project, and am now in touch about this with the decision makers both at Springer and CUP. If his work can be used to make iOS eBooks, […]

there's a whole different type of consideration that should be taken into account: license matters.

iPad TeX at the TUG 2010 conference in San Francisco was all the rage. And I'm not speaking here of Don Knuth's famous iTeX announcement <http://river-valley.tv/tug-2010/an-earthshaking-announcement>: there was a preliminary version of TeXShop for the iPad that Dick Koch showed around on his iPad. The problem, he said, is that you need to convert TeX into a library (IIRC), and that's not the easiest thing. (I cannot say more, again not being a programmer.) And there was also Will Cheswick's "TeX and the iPad" presentation <http://river-valley.tv/tex-and-the-ipad/>.

At TUG 2012 in Boston the matter came around again in discussions, this time from another angle: software on the iPad needs the App Store to install, and the App Store is clearly incompatible with the GPL. That may apply to version 3 only, not 2, but I really know even less on legal matters that on programming.

Karl Berry, for example, said explicitly that kpathsea couldn't be included in any software distributed through the App Store. (Karl, if you're reading this on MacTeX, please correct me if I'm misquoting from memory and I'll post the correction to the Textures list.) I don't know whether that applies to all of TeX and friends, or just pieces of TeX Live. Most of the LaTeX base and macro files are LPPL: would this be compatible with the App Store either?

I don't know whether what you mean is getting a (public-domain, hopefully) version of Textures available to everybody through the App Store, or selling Textures to Springer or CUP such that it could be used in-house to produce e-Books.

Of course, there's the possibility of turning the Textures code (once public domain) into software for Android tablets, which could avoid the legal App Store issues. I'm not sure that (given what I've read about Android) this would be compatible with the Textures philosophy which has always been uncompromising on quality. But I can't say more, having never used an Android device myself.

Bruno Voisin