[texworks] Beginners' needs (was: Lua scripting)

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 18 juin 09 à 13:53, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard a écrit :

> 2. Make pdflatex the default. I'm afraid many won't agree, but here  
> is the
> argument: people who come to TeX without knowing the about the  
> various engine
> and formats generally want to use LaTeX. People who come to TeX for  
> XeTeX
> generally *know* what XeTeX is and why they want it, and I guess the  
> same is
> true for context users.

That's what I had in mind.

With one reservation though: from collaborating with people, I  
experienced first hand that for most people TeX still means TeX+dvips 
+gs, and in particular that features specific to PostScript are often  
used (generally though pstricks). So until there's a fully transparent  
way to process documents involving pstricks commands in pdfTeX, maybe  
TeX+dvips+gs would be a better choice.

(Maybe Hans would have a different opinion, with ConTeXt in mind. The  
above is LaTeX-oriented I admit.)

Don't get me wrong: I don't like the TeX+dvips+gs route very much  
myself, for example because dvips cannot break hyperlinks across  
lines, and also because these means two more aux files .dvi and .ps  
cluttering users' directories.

My personal taste would be XeTeX the default, when a fully Unicode  
math fonts is released (STIX?) and its integration
with XeTeX is completed so that XeTeX can process documents with lots  
of maths as well as pdfTeX does (and without fall-back to Computer  
Modern). But we're not quite there yet I'm afraid.

Bruno Voisin