[OS X TeX] My next book has been created with TeX...

[Richard Koch]

Gerben,

Nice to hear from you. Congratulations on the book.

-------

Gerben was active in the TeX on OS X world from the very beginning
of OS X. He wrote i-Intaller, a program which installed packages over the internet;
in particular this was the standard way for Mac Users to get TeX for many, many years.
See

	http://ii2.sourceforge.net <http://ii2.sourceforge.net/>

Users also obtained Ghostscript, Font Utilities, and other important pieces of TeX
that way.

Gerben’s TeX distribution was based on teTeX by Thomas Esser. When teTeX was
discontinued in 2006, Gerben created a new distribution based on TeX Live and
still distributed through i-Installer.

Gerben wrote simpdftex, a script in TeX Live which typesets by calling latex to
typeset, and then calling dvips to convert the resulting dvi to postscript, and then
calling ghostscript or other distillers to convert the postscript to pdf. This script
is still used in TeXShop and other front ends.

The first versions of MacTeX installed Gerben’s TeX Distribution. He did all the
hard work, and we just repackaged.

Shortly after Gerben created a TeX Live based distribution, he announced
end of support for that distribution. This caused panic in the Mac world, until
we switched to TeX Live.

So how to put this — Gerben was THE key figure in the Mac world for TeX from
the start around 1998 until at least 2007. 

Dick Koch


> On Dec 9, 2014, at 5:31 PM, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 9, 2014, at 7:16 PM, Ettore Aldrovandi <ealdrov at mail.math.fsu.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Dec 9, 2014, at 20:03, Alain Schremmer <schremmer.alain at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Isn't Wierda the author of SyncTeX?
>>> 
>>> Regards
>>> --schremmer
>>> 
>> 
>> It’s Jérôme Laurens, as far as I remember.
>> 
>> Again, if memory doesn’t fail me, with Wierda they authored the system of symlinks that points to /usr/texbin  plus the distribution switch.
>> 
>> —Ettore
> 
> Howdy,
> 
> Jérome Laurens did write synctex (and the pdfsync package before that). He also worked on TeXShop, in the early days, and wrote iTeXMac, YAFE (Yet Another Front End) to TeX. Finally he put together the TeX Distribution Preference Pane; and hopefully is working on a fix for Yosemite. :-)
> 
> Both Gerben and Jérome worked on the TeX Distribution structure used by MacTeX to allow for changing of active TeX distribution.
> 
> Good Luck,
> 
> Herb Schulz
> (herbs at wideopenwest dot com)
> 
> 
> 
> 
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