[texworks] new Mac binary posted - testing welcome

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi,

On 2009-07-10 06:41, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> Le 10 juil. 09 à 01:40, Juergen Fenn a écrit :
>
> One suggestion (for future releases): I've always expected the small
> boxes at the bottom of the Windows (line number in the editor,
> magnification and page number in the previewer) to act as dialogs: you
> double-click on either of them and a dialog pops up allowing the line
> number, magnification or page number  to be changed. Is that planned
> in a future release (I'm in no rush about that at all, just curious)?

I've been trying something like that a little while back (issue 91,
http://code.google.com/p/texworks/issues/detail?id=91). Unfortunately,
my patch turned out to unnecessarily clutter the Mac interface (which
has larger widgets than the other platforms). But yes, in principle this
isn't that difficult.

> Working all very fine in any case, and installation straightforward (I
> deleted beforehand the QT libraries in /Library/Frameworks and
> hunspell and poppler libraries in /usr/local/lib, to be on the safe
> side, I don't know whether that was required).

Though I don't know anything about the way Mac handles libraries, I'd
assume (or rather: hope) that it would not have been necessary. The
logical procedure would be that if the libraries are included in the
.app file, those are used and the rest of the libs in the system are
ignored. But as I said, that's all really just speculation.

> Exploring inside the app bundle, I see there are codecs and image
> formats built-in (for JPEG, TIFF, GIF, MNG (? -- no idea what that
> is)) in TeXworks.app/Contents/plugins, I imagine that means it will be
> possible to include files in the corresponding formats via
> \includegraphics in LaTeX, and also that teXworks recognizes a plugin
> architecture. Very interesting.

Simple answer: sorry, no (unless Jonathan has covertly made some huge
changes to the sources without anyone noticing ;)). There's no plugin
support (yet), and there's no user-friendly (i.e. with nice dialogs,
etc.) way of including graphics (other than the native *TeX way). But
they are planned for future versions AFAIK.

What you found is probably part of the Qt framework. See
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/plugins-howto.html#static-plugins, where
they write "When compiled as a static library, Qt provides the following
static plugins:".

FYI: MNG also is a file format, though not a very wide-spread one
(AFAIK). From their web-page (http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/) it's a "A
PNG-like Image Format Supporting Multiple Images, Animation and
Transparent JPEG" (and I'm pretty sure *TeX doesn't support it ;)).

-Stefan