[texworks] Mac OS X: request for testing

[Otared Kavian]

Hi Stefan,

I did what you suggested for testing your compilation of TeXWorks. Here are the results:

1) When creating a new file, say test.tex, the error message does not appear. But when one closes test.tex and re-open it the warning:
	Script "Babel language": ReferenceError: Can't find variable: target
appears.

2) I guess the command 
	\usepackage[...]{babel} 
is specific to LaTeX, which I am not really familiar with (I am rather ConTeXt, or Plain TeX, oriented…), and I have never used with such directives: so I don’t know what should be a test file in this regard… Sorry! If you have a test file with or without such a command, I can test it for you if you send it to me.

Best regards: OK

> On 05 Mar 2016, at 22:08, Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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