TeXworks
lowering the entry barrier to the TeX world

Jonathan Kew

Introduction

The TeXworks project is an effort to build a simple TeX front-end program (working environment) that will be available for all today’s major desktop operating systems—in particular, MS Windows (XP and Vista), typical GNU/Linux distros and other X11-based systems, and Mac OS X. It is deliberately modeled on Dick Koch’s award-winning TeXShop for Mac OS X, which is credited with a resurgence of TeX usage on the Mac platform.

To provide a similar experience across other systems, TeXworks is based on cross-platform, open source tools and libraries. The Qt toolkit was chosen for the quality of its cross-platform user interface capabilities, with native “look and feel” on each platform being a realistic target. Qt also provides a rich application framework, facilitating the relatively rapid development of a usable product.

The normal TeXworks workflow will be PDF-centric, using pdfTeX and XeTeX as typesetting engines and generating PDF documents as the default formatted output. Although it will still be possible to configure a processing path based on DVI, newcomers to the TeX world need not be concerned with DVI at all, but can generally treat TeX as a system that goes directly from marked-up text files to ready-to-use PDF documents.

TeXworks includes an integrated PDF viewer, based on the Poppler library, so there is no need to switch to an external program such as Acrobat, xpdf, etc., to view the typeset output. The integrated viewer also supports source/preview synchronization (e.g., control-click within the source text to locate the corresponding position in the PDF, and vice versa). This capability is based on the new “SyncTeX” feature developed by Jérôme Laurens, and supported by both the pdfTeX and XeTeX programs in TeX Live 2008 and other current releases.

Online resources

There is a mailing list available for discussion of any topics related to the TeXworks project. You can search the list archives online.

TeXworks development is currently hosted at Google Code; this is where most resources including downloads can be found.

A few screenshots are available showing TeXworks prototypes at various stages of development, running on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu), Windows XP, and Mac OS X.

Presentations introducing TeXworks have been given at recent TeX conferences. A video recording from the TUG 2008 conference is now available, as well as an earlier one from BachoTeX 2008, thanks to River Valley Technologies. The PDF slides (1.5MB) used for the TUG 2008 presentation are also available.

Features planned for initial release

• Simple GUI text editor
  • Unicode support using standard OpenType fonts
  • multi-level undo/redo
  • search & replace, with (optional) regex support
  • comment/uncomment lines, etc.
  • TeX/LaTeX syntax coloring
  • auto-completion for easy insertion of common commands
  • templates to provide a starting point for common document types
• Ability to run TeX on the current document to generate PDF
  • extensible set of TeX commands (with pdftex, pdflatex, xelatex, context, etc. being preconfigured)
  • also support running BibTeX, Makeindex, etc.
  • terminal output appears in a “console” panel of the document window; automatically hidden if no errors occur
  • support “root document” metadata so “Typeset” works from an included file
• Preview window to view the output
  • anti-aliased PDF display
  • automatically opens when TeX finishes
  • auto-refresh when re-typesetting (stay at same page/view)
  • TeXShop-like “magnifying glass” feature to examine detail in the preview
  • one-click re-typesetting from either source or preview
  • source/preview synchronization based on Jérôme Laurens’ SyncTeX technology

How can you help?

TeXworks is a free and open source software project, and you are invited to participate; some suggested ways are listed below, but this is not exhaustive. Note that most of these items do not require a programmer! Many other skills are just as vital. Some ways to contribute:

• get the code and try building it on your platform; provide feedback and patches as needed
• if there’s a current binary download available for your platform, try that
• try using the prototype for some real work, and give feedback on what’s good, what’s bad, what’s broken
• dig in to the code, and submit patches to fix bugs or implement missing features
• write documentation and tutorials for newcomers to TeXworks and TeX; both standalone documentation and pages suitable for online help are welcome
• review and enhance the command completion lists available for the integrated editor
• provide well-commented templates for various types of document
• design icons for the toolbars, etc.; TeXworks has some nice icons from Qt and the Tango project, but others are merely rough placeholders
• use the Qt Linguist tool to localize the user interface for your language
• package TeXworks appropriately for your favorite GNU/Linux or BSD distribution, or create and maintain a proper installer for the Windows platform

Future plans

• intelligent handling of TeX errors
• assistance with graphics inclusion and format conversions
• text search and copy in the PDF preview
• support rich PDF features such as transitions, embedded media (sound, video), annotations, etc.
• customizable palettes of symbols, commands, etc.
• TeX documentation lookup/browser
• interaction with external editors and other tools
• additional support for navigating in the source, e.g., “folding” sections of text, recognizing document structure tags such as \section, etc.

Thanks

The TeXworks project arose out of discussions at several recent TUG meetings, and initial development has been generously supported by TUG’s TeX development fund and its contributors, and by UK-TUG.

Special thanks to Karl Berry for his encouragement and support, and to Dick Koch for showing us the potential of a clean, simple TeX environment for the average user.

$Date: 2008-08-19 20:04:00 +0100 (Tue, 19 Aug 2008) $