[OS X TeX] Nobody knows

[Will Robertson]

(Apologies to Bruno who will have received this twice.)

Bruno Voisin wrote:
 > Le 23 mars 04, à 10:13, Will Robertson a écrit :
 >
 > There has been a discussion on this among the MacTeX working group of 
 > TUG, and a special initiative (called TeX Wrapper) launched by 
Gerben. > This initiative was finally terminated early this year, due to 
lack of > developers' interest.
 >
 > If you think TeX wrappers (the technical name for folder packages,
 > like .pkg packages, appearing as single files in OS X) are
 > interesting, it's time to advocate them, so that developers' interest
 > could be revived.

Advocate to whom? As far as I know, there's only a few active developers 
who work on TeX apps on Mac, and I don't know any of them besides what I 
see of their postings here.

Regarding the idea, I think Gerben expressed it best back when it came 
up seriously for the first time:

"I think this is a brilliant idea. Next to font support, I do not know 
of a better way to take TeX forward on the Mac and make it better than 
*any* other TeX. After all, which other OS has this file bundle 
mechanism on board. that is a strength of Mac OS X we can build 
something great on."

I mean, all you need to do for a really basic implementation is to allow 
iTeXMac to open .texd bundles by opening the tex file inside, and save 
in the same manner. The process is transparent to the underlying 
engines, and for simple use you never need to access the log/aux/etc 
files anyway.

This implementation would get annoying when you wanted to add 
graphics/multiple input files/to typeset HTML---but it doesn't take too 
much thought to think of ways to implement them successfully.

I just wish I had enough leisure time to brush up on my programming 
skills (which at present don't extend very far) and try out some of 
these ideas. I suppose I'll just have to leave it to the philosophers.

Will Robertson
-----------------------------------------------------
Please see <http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/> for list
guidelines, information, and LaTeX/TeX resources.