[texworks] Mac OS X: request for testing

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi,

On 05.03.2016 00:25, Otared Kavian wrote:
> I just tested your new version of TeXWorks (Version 0.5 (travis-ci) [r.680f88c, 05/03/16 04:20]).
> Now the Quit TeXWorks items is present in all situations and works as expected.

Excellent!

> For your information, when opening a file (created by TeXWorks) one gets the message:
>
> 	Script "Babel language": ReferenceError: Can't find variable: target
>
> But I don’t know what are the consequences nor the reasons for such a message.

This message is presumably triggered by the "bableLanguage.js" script
that is bundled with Tw. It is intended to scan all newly opened TeX
documents for a \usepackage[...]{babel} statement and, if found, set the
spell checking language accordingly (unless it is overridden by other
means, such as a "% !TEX spellcheck =" directive). The error message you
mention seems to indicate that there is something wrong with how the
script and Tw should interact, but unfortunately I can't reproduce it
here at the moment.

Just to make sure: can you close Tw download the latest version of the
script from
https://github.com/TeXworks/texworks/raw/master/res/resfiles/scripts/Hooks/babelLanguage.js
and put it in ~/Library/TeXworks/scripts/Hooks/ (where the old version
should be), and then restart Tw (so we start with a clean slate)?

Then:
*) does this message occur when creating a new file?
*) does this message occur when opening an existing file with a
\usepackage[...]{babel} statement?
*) does this message occur when opening an existing file without a
\usepackage[...]{babel} statement?


> However still one cannot print a PDF file, nor the source file, with TeXWorks.

Yes, this is a known issue. The problem is that the Qt interface for
poppler (which is used by Tw under the hood for processing and
displaying pdfs) can only render images. That is fine for displaying
stuff on screen, but is not good for actual printing for several
reasons: first of all, we would need to render all pages at a high
resolution to get acceptable results. This does not only take a long
time and a lot of processing power, but also requires a lot of data to
be transmitted to the printer (e.g., over a network connection).
Secondly, consider somebody printing to a pdf printer or similar. They
would expect a nice vector file, but instead get a bloated pixelized
file. So as long as there is no vector painting framework, I think there
is no good way to implement printing of pdfs.
For the tex files, the story is slightly different. There, we could
potentially print the files as we don't have to deal with poppler.
However, I don't see many use cases at the moment where somebody wants
to physically print "source code". In fact, I would rather fear that
this might cause confusion, raising expectations that you can actually
print the pdf output.

I hope this sheds some light into these matters,
Stefan