Application: TeXworks
Category: Office
Description: From the publisher's website:
The TeXworks project is an effort to build 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/Vista/7), typical GNU/Linux distros and other X11-based systems, as well as 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 all 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 is PDF-centric, using pdfTeX and XeTeX as typesetting engines and generating PDF documents as the default formatted output. Although it is 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 “SyncTeX” feature developed by Jérôme Laurens, and supported by both the pdfTeX and XeTeX programs in TeX Live and other current distributions.
Download TeXworks Portable 0.6.1 Dev Test 2 (15.9MB download / 45.2MB installed)
(MD5: a237e42dff3ac2cc45952479d0dcdae0)
Note: TeXworks relies on MiKTeX Portable for actual TeX processing.
Release Notes:
See all release notes at the SourceForge project page
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in Launcher\TeXWorksPortable.ini:
use in the [Launch] section
ProgramExecutable=TexWorks\TexWorks.exe
since with the line as shipped the program will not execute.
In the section [RegistryValueWrite] on RHS of 'HKCU\Software\TUG\TeXworks\binaryPaths=', replace %PAL:PortableAppsBaseDir:ForwardSlash% with %PAL:PortableAppsDir:Forwardslash%.
my limited understanding is that distinct strings in a registry multi-string are separated by null characters ('\0' in C/C++ conventions, ascii code 0), so their insertion would seem yo necessitate a character count (inclusive of the null terminators); looks like custom code to me, but--again--my understanding of these things may be far off the mark; would appreciate any elucidation.
(1)"are separated by null characters" should read "are terminated by null characters"; the last string in the list is terminated with '\0' also
(2)in "would seem yo necessitate" replace "yo" w/ "to"
I must have accidentally reverted the launcher.ini file to an incomplete state before packaging the installer because it worked when I was testing... thanks for the catch of this (really stupid) mistake. As for the registry values, I was unsure of the convention, but I'll be looking further into it before Dev Test 2.
I found a way to use a configuration file to set both profile location and the paths. This negates the need for registry writes and directory moves. These are implemented in Dev Test 2.
more robust, less potential for fragility
Updated to 0.4.5 Dev Test 2. See release notes for details.
In Launcher\TeXWorksPortable.ini, you have:
[FileWrite1]
Type=Replace
File=%PAL:DataDir%\config\texworks-setup.ini
Find=DATADIR
Replace=%PAL:DataDir:ForwardSlash%
[FileWrite2]
Type=Replace
File=%PAL:DataDir%\config\texworks-setup.ini
Find=%PAL:LastPackagePartialDir%
Replace=%PAL:PackagePartialDir%
Why is the forward-slash version used in FileWrite1 but not in FileWrite2? it doesn't look right; it might be, but...
Also, I think FileWrite2 should have the drive embedded in the find-replace since it is the combination of the 2 that one wants to modify. So, off the bat, it seems that FileWrite2 should read:
[FileWrite2]
Type=Replace
File=%PAL:DataDir%\config\texworks-setup.ini
Find=%PAL:LastDrive%%PAL:LastPackagePartialDir:Forwardslash%
Replace=%PAL:Drive%%PAL:PackagePartialDir:Forwardslash%
The first one is definitely incorrect, I can vouch for that one. That will be fixed in the next release. The second I'm probably not going to change still. From what I've seen, it's pretty conventional to leave the Drive fixing and the Package fixing separate so that each step is clearly defined. I will give it some thought, though, especially if I can't find other paths that don't rely on the drive letter alone.
cannot compile LaTeX, unless, of course, MikTeX is already installed (in which case the installed MikTeX binaries are on the system path); must at least add to Launcher\TeXWorksPortable.ini the lines:
[Environment]
path=%PAL:PortableAppsDir%\MikTeXPortable\App\MikTeX\miktex\bin;%path%
I'm really starting to dislike the heavy use of PATH by all these TeX programs... Thanks for that catch, though. The PATH and the mistype above will be fixed in the next release.
I can understand your frustration; they all have a path prefix type of modification embedded in the config files such as ones from DefaultData. However, if the config file mod to the path prefix is done, then the user having a true custom path mod to make (e.g., her own, ultra-customized version of R), will proceed innocently do so in the config panel, where she encounters in the path prefix a horrendously long path spec for MikTeX, gsview, etc.; this s very off-putting for anyone & a potential show-stopper for a newbie; just my 2 bits
Updated to 0.4.5 Dev Test 3. See release notes for details.
Updated to 0.4.5 Dev Test 4. See release notes for details.
Updated to 0.6.1 Dev Test 1. See release notes for details.
Updated to 0.6.1 Dev Test 2. See release notes for details.