[OS X TeX] New alpha Textures with support for graphics

[Gary L.Gray]

On Jul 13, 2006, at 10:57 AM, André Bellaïche wrote:

> Le 13 juil. 06 à 16:30, Kevin Walzer a écrit :
>
>> Just curious--what does Textures offer that TexShop et. al does  
>> not? I
>> tried to download a version to try, but apparently you already  
>> need to
>> be a registered customer. (This company charges $30 just to demo  
>> one of
>> its other products...)
>
> Examples of things Textures did very well in 2001, and Texshop does  
> not do correctly, even in 2006.
>
> Ex. 1. Search and replace in a 300 pages document. Textures does it  
> in a fraction of second, whereas Texshop gets lost. Maybe only when  
> the word to search contains an antislash symbol, but I am not sure.  
> Anyway, words with antislash are quite common in TeX. So when we  
> have such an operation to execite in Texshp, we prefer to open the  
> file in MacOS9 system for a while.

I disagree. TeXShop does a very nice job with this and is blazingly  
fast. I have never had any trouble.

> Ex. 2. Using any font in the disk, just by typing "\font\myfont =  
> whatever…you…want at 12pt". You need not know the diffrence  
> between .pfa and .pfb. You don't even need to know that .pfb  
> exists. Of course XeTeX does that, but, as a price, you get some  
> problems with cmr fonts.

I, for one, don't want to use any font on my disk. I am happy with  
the many fonts provided by gwTeX and I have installed any others that  
I want to use. I mostly do mathematics and I am only interested in  
fonts that have extensive (i.e., amsmath) math support.

> Ex. 3. When TeX halts because of an error, Textures is not so  
> stupid to stop in the middle of a word in the .aux file, a feature  
> of Texshop that is bound to yields error when you restart  
> typesetting. Of course the authors of Texshop know that, this why  
> you have a button named "Trash Aux Files".

I have experienced this, but I must say that I only need to  
trash .aux files about once or twice a year. I can't remember the  
last time I had to do it.

> Ex. 4. You don't have to register a file before typesetting it.

What does that mean? Save it? If so, that's not really much of an  
inconvenience.

> You don't have either to add a .tex suffix at the end of its name  
> (but maybe in the new version, Textures will have to comply with  
> the new Unix/Windows features of MacOS X).

I don't mind that either.

> i'll send you more examples when I think about them. This occurs  
> quite frequently, since I work all the day on Texshop after having  
> been very happy with Textures for years.

And before you all get too worked up about how great Textures was/is,  
let's look at some of the advantages of TeXShop over Textures, which,  
off the top of my head, are:

Textures was never as compatible with the rest of the TeX world as  
gwTeX is and it took forever to update their underlying engine when  
updates to LaTeX were released (and it wasn't easy for the user to do).

Textures never included syntax coloring (does it finally have it now?).

Textures didn't have all the cool time-saving stuff that TeXShop has  
like autocompletion and great macros.

After Becky Kaluza left Blue Sky, their support went to hell. I was  
never able to get good support after she left.

I guess I am surprised that everyone is so excited about Textures  
after Blue Sky completely abandoned the Mac TeX community for all  
those years after OS X was released. If I remember correctly, they  
put a lot of their development efforts into some sort of plug-in for  
Quark Xpress and there were even rumors they were developing a  
version of Textures for Windows (I don't know if those rumors were  
ever confirmed).

That's it -- I have other stuff to do.

-- Gary------------------------- Info --------------------------
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