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

T T t34www at googlemail.com
Thu Jun 18 15:57:01 CEST 2009


2009/6/18 Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at me.com>:
> 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.

Currently it is not that strightforward to configure TW for dvi route.
It requires a batch/shell script for one click operation, since there
is no possibility to chain different tools specified in the
preferences. From that point of view pdflatex seems to be a better
default.

But I do agree that good defaults matter in general and in that
context I would make a suggestion to change the default syntax
highlighting colours. In particular the red colour for comments
strikes me as quite poor choice. Here are the settings I use atm.:

    [LaTeX]
    # LaTeX environments
    magenta	N	\\(?:begin|end)(?=[^A-Za-z@])

    # braces and brackets
    red		N [][{}]

    # special characters
    green		N	[#$^_&]

    # LaTeX packages
    royalblue	N	\\usepackage(?=[^A-Za-z@])

    # control sequences
    blue		N	\\(?:[A-Za-z@]+|.)

    # comments
    grey			N	%.*

I changed some syntax patterns but that's just a personal preference.
As for the colours I think that grey or green for comments and red for
braces (to make them stand out) are quite good choices. Blue for
commands feels right and magenta for environments mixes well with
that. Of course this is something very subjective, so opinions on that
will vary I suspect.

Cheers,

Tomek


More information about the texworks mailing list