[OS X TeX] LaTeX on iPad?

[Herbert Schulz]

On Mar 6, 2010, at 9:15 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> 
> 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.)
> 

Howdy,

Yes... I also remember the splash it made too! Very impressive. i suspected this wouldn't be the hard part; as long as there is enough free space.

> 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

How easy is it to even transfer text files back and forth between the completer and the iPad? Is there a ``PDFKit'' for the iPhone/iPad? I figured that this would be the hard part. I don't have the iPhone SDK here so I don't know if there is a simple text editor example that runs on the iPhone/iPad.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)