TeXworks 0.1 R352

TeXworks 0.1 R352 is specially designed to make a simple TeX front-end program (working environment) that will be available for all today’s major desktop operating systems—in particular, MS Windows (XP and Vista), typical GNU/Linux distros and other X11-based systems, and Mac OS X. It is deliberately modeled on Dick Koch’s award-winning TeXShop for Mac OS X, which is credited with a resurgence of TeX usage on the Mac platform.

To provide a similar experience across other systems, TeXworks is based on cross-platform, open source tools and libraries. The Qt toolkit was chosen for the quality of its cross-platform user interface capabilities, with native “look and feel” on each platform being a realistic target. Qt also provides a rich application framework, facilitating the relatively rapid development of a usable product.

The normal TeXworks workflow will be PDF-centric, using pdfTeX and XeTeX as typesetting engines and generating PDF documents as the default formatted output. Although it will still be possible to configure a processing path based on DVI, newcomers to the TeX world need not be concerned with DVI at all, but can generally treat TeX as a system that goes directly from marked-up text files to ready-to-use PDF documents.

TeXworks includes an integrated PDF viewer, based on the Poppler library, so there is no need to switch to an external program such as Acrobat, xpdf, etc., to view the typeset output. The integrated viewer also supports source/preview synchronization (e.g., control-click within the source text to locate the corresponding position in the PDF, and vice versa). This capability is based on the new “SyncTeX” feature developed by Jérôme Laurens, and supported by both the pdfTeX and XeTeX programs in TeX Live 2008 and other current releases. 

Major Features: 

1. Simple GUI text editor
   • Unicode support using standard OpenType fonts
   • Multi-level undo/redo
   • Search & replace, with (optional) regex support
   • Comment/uncomment lines, etc.
   • TeX/LaTeX syntax coloring
   • Auto-completion for easy insertion of common commands
   • Templates to provide a starting point for common document types
2. Ability to run TeX on the current document to generate PDF
   • Extensible set of TeX commands (with pdftex, pdflatex, xelatex, context, etc. being preconfigured)
   • Also support running BibTeX, Makeindex, etc.
   • Terminal output appears in a “console” panel of the document window; automatically hidden if no errors occur
   • Support “root document” metadata so “Typeset” works from an included file
3. Preview window to view the output
   • Anti-aliased PDF display
   • Automatically opens when TeX finishes
   • Auto-refresh when re-typesetting (stay at same page/view)
   • TeXShop-like “magnifying glass” feature to examine detail in the preview
   • One-click re-typesetting from either source or preview
   • Source/preview synchronization based on Jérôme Laurens’ SyncTeX technology