[OS X TeX] Updated MacDviX and MacGhostViewX

Tom Kiffe tom at kiffe.com
Mon Mar 18 20:11:12 CET 2002



MacDviX is a dvi previewer for teTeX which has much of the functionality of
xdvi but does not need X11. It uses the teTeX texmf tree for tfm, pk and vf
fonts and uses teTeX binaries to generate pk fonts.

MacGhostViewX is a Postscript previewer for teTeX and ghostscript which does not need X11. It is based on ghostscript 7.04 and requires a ghostscript 6.01 
or later installation since it uses ghostscript binaries and fonts. This 
package only contains the library files needed to run ghostscript 7.04 and does
not duplicate the standard ghostscript fonts or binaries.

Both programs are now bundled applications with no resource forks and should
work even with a UFS file system. If a file is open in either program and that
file is changed by another program, e.g., running any form of tex on the 
source file, the previewer will automatically load the changed dvi or
Postscript file.

Like recent versions of xdvi, MacDviX supports the srcltx package. If you 
include this package in your tex source file, tex will add \specials to the
dvi file. When you option-click in a displayed dvi file MacDviX uses these 
\specials to report the line number and the source file corresponding to the
mouse click. If you are using BBEdit, BBEdit Lite, or Alpha MacDviX will have
your editor open the source file and highlight the particular line. This
functionality is very useful during the preliminaries stages of typesetting
when you are debugging your tex source files since you can efficiently jump
back to the source file when you see a problem in your dvi file. When you 
have finished the basic debugging of your tex sources you should remove the
srcltx package before generating Postscript or PDF output.

As mentioned above, MacDviX can have your editor open the source file and highlight the appropriate line only if you are using BBEdit or Alpha. This
can be extended to other editors which have some mechanism whereby another
program can tell them to open a particular file and highlight a given line.
Send me email if you want to implement this feature with a different editor.

Unlike Mac GS Viewer, MacGhostViewX is a Postscript viewer for OS X which 
actually works. Besides displaying Postscript and PDF files it can add a 
PICT resource to an eps file, convert an eps file to PDF, and extract specific
pages from a Postscript file.

Both programs are free and can be freely redistributed. They can be downloaded
>from http://www.kiffe.com/textools.html.

Tom Kiffe



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