[texworks] Current status of Tw development

[Stefan Löffler]

On 2010-11-17 16:21, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> Le 17 nov. 2010 à 15:40, Stefan Löffler a écrit :
>
>> PS: By the way, Tw's primary goal is not to replace other dedicated
>> (free) pdf viewers out there. There are many excellent ones that have a
>> much larger feature set than the Tw previewer. Its primary goal is to
>> provide just that: a quick and easy previewer for the final document to
>> facilitate the work.
> With that I must say I don't agree. Tw's primary goal, as I understand it, is to provide a cross-platform all-in-one TeX GUI, allowing to:
>
> - create/open/save files via a File menu,
>
> - edit these files via an Edit menu,
>
> - typeset them via a Typeset menu,
>
> - view the output via a View menu,
>
> - print this output via the File menu again,
>
> pretty much in the same way as TeXShop does for the Mac alone (and Textures before it for Mac OS Classic, and TeXview to some extent for the NeXt).

I agree that printing would be nice to have. As would be, e.g.,
continues display in the previewer. Or preview abilities for dvi and ps.
Some people might request that as well (and probably rightly so).
However, none of that is currently available in a state to be put in a
stable release right now (IMHO, at least).

>> But for the official code base, I don't think the
>> patch is ready as the result can be unpredictable (for the average
>> user), and depends on certain features and programs that may or may not
>> be available on the user's system. From my current POV, printing will
>> therefore not be part of the official 0.4 stable release, sorry.
>
> With this I do agree: given the printing patch is AFAIK available for Windows alone (it sure isn't present in Mac builds), better not have it in any official build, for cross-platform consistency.

Well, printing should work on Linux by use of the command line tool lpr.
This may be available on all typical installations, but I don't know for
sure. Besides, its quite old (there are other, more modern systems like
CUPS, but again you need to have it installed, you need a proper
interface, ...) and options (like which pages to print, ...) are device
specific. So it works, but hasn't been tested thoroughly. The same
system would be used on Mac, but if it's typically available there at
all I have no idea.
On Windows, the postscript code is sent to the printer directly if that
is supported.
If all these methods fail (regardless of the platform), the pdf will be
printed as a sequence of images, just like they are displayed on the
screen. That's very bad, of course, and has been reported to result in
crappy output.

But again: the patch exists, and if someone wants to toy around with it
and/or build a version of Tw that has that patch (or others) included,
he can do that - it's open source. But the official builds won't have it
included from today's perspective.

HTH
Stefan