[OS X TeX] LaTeX on iPad?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 Mar 2010, at 14:37, Herbert Schulz wrote:

> 
> On Mar 6, 2010, at 7:53 AM, David Derbes wrote:
> 
>> This may well be the wrong place to ask, and if so I apologize in advance.
>> 
>> I'm thinking about an iPad. It's disappointing that this thing won't run native OS X apps (and who knows, maybe down the road a new version will), but is there any thought to porting LaTeX (and TeXShop?) to the iPhone OS (or whatever the iPad runs)?
>> 
>> I think the iPad is mostly going to be a passive device (a terrific browser and reader, not necessarily terrific for creating content except email or other nearly pure text), so perhaps this is a foolish question.
>> 
>> David Derbes
>> U of Chicago Lab Schools
> 
> Howdy,
> 
> Just guessing here but I don't think it's a simple task to move things over to the iPhone SDK since it's much more limiting.


It'd be easy to port TeX/pdfTeX/LaTeX/etc to the iPad. (We showed e-TeX and a prototype DVI viewer running on the iPhone last year; see Kaveh's presentation from TUG '09, for example.)

A full authoring environment such as TeXShop or TeXworks would be more challenging; it'd certainly be possible, but it would need some thoughtful redesign - both for the editing and viewing interface, and also general file management - to work well in the entirely touch-based environment.

JK