[texworks] Beginners' needs (was: Lua scripting)

[David J. Perry]

From: "Alain Delmotte" <esperanto at swing.be>

> Sure, I have many points on the to-do list, but time! time! time!
> (I thought that having up-to-date binaries for Windows was more important; 
> now that I can do this more or less routinely, I'll try to go back to the 
> manual).
I understand about time . . . and you were right about the importance of the 
making the binaries available.

> Your are right that some introduction to what is the meaning of the 
> different options of the interface is important, but, on another hand, I 
> also have the experience that, when a manual becomes too tick, beginners 
> do not use it.
Quite true.  What I'm suggesting, however, would only take a page or two, 
and will help avoid a lot of frustration if people don't have some info they 
need.  (Nobody ever said learning TeX was easy!)  If the writing is 
carefully structured (short paragraphs, bullet points, pointers such as 
"this page is for . . . . go to page X if you need . . . ") readers will be 
able to move through it easily.

> I did create a collaborative site for the manual, you can join, go to: 
> http://affinitiz.com/space/texworks and click "Rejoindre la communauté"
I'll check it out this weekend--my French is good so that's not a problem.

> I was also planing to transform the manual to html and this in turn could 
> be linked to TeXworks as the help file (even using F1)!
> What do you think about the idea?
Sounds good.  (I'm not an expert at writing help files, though; maybe 
there's a better way I don't know about.)

> But the program SumatraPDF allows you to open a file, go back to TeXworks, 
> compile and when you go back to Sumatra the file is updated!!!
Thanks for this--I will check out Sumatra.

> But I don't know if Sumatra exists outside of Windows nor if there is 
> something equivalent on the other platforms!
A quick Google search indicates it's only on Windows, unfortunately.

David