[texworks] message from TeXworks user

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 13 févr. 2010 à 22:31, Reinhard Kotucha a écrit :

> On 13 February 2010 Daniel Becker wrote:
> 
>> ... are you sure that sam2p comes with TeXLive? Not here
>> (MacTeX-version of TL 2009).
> 
> TeX Live provides sam2p for Windows only.  On Unix TeX Live avoids to
> interfere with sam2p provided by the package management systems.
> Does OS X provide facilities to install external software (like
> apt-get in Debian)?

Yes, there are either MacPorts, based on BSD ports,

	http://www.macports.org/

and Fink, based on Debian apt-get,

	http://www.finkproject.org/

Fink used to be the most popular, but it seems to have slipped behind recently for some reason. MacPorts builds all packages from source on the local machine, while Fink installs pre-built packages.

Both imply a number of system overrides. For example the installation for MacPorts says "add ${prefix}/bin and ${prefix}/sbin to the start of your PATH environment variable so that MacPorts-installed programs take precedence over system-provided programs of the same name." Personally I refuse this and accept only software that adds to the OS and plays by its rules, not something that modifies the behaviour of the OS in any way (having had bad experiences with extension incompatibilities and resulting chronic instability with Mac OS in the mid 90s). 

> I mentioned sam2p because it creates much smaller files than
> ImageMagick.  See:
> 
>  http://pts.szit.bme.hu/sam2p/

Thanks for bringing attention to this software, I wasn't aware of its existence. It seems not to have undergone updates for a long time, is it still maintained?

Bruno Voisin