mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Gubinelli Massimiliano <address@hidden>]

Hi,

On 23 nov. 09, at 06:58, Madhusudan Singh wrote:

Thanks for the update.

Installing an entire GUI library (Qt) just to use one app just seems like an overkill. I will just use texmacs on a linux machine somewhere if I need to. I can manage without it since a combination of TeXshop, Word and Pages does most of the work TeXmacs can do (not counting the plugins of course).

Qt is a cross-platform library so it is meant to be used maybe by just one app. On the Mac metrics are as follows: fully independent TeXmacs.app bundle (including Qt, fonts, docs and support files) is worth 83 mb. Of them Qt frameworks take 30 Mb (QtCore and QtGui), resources take another 50 Mb and executable take 5mb. So the compromise between size and effectiveness (Qt allow us to develop just one codebase for all Windows, Mac and Unix machines) is actually very good. In my Application directory TeXmacs.app is still one of the medium sized apps (compare for example with TeXshop which weights 64 Mb or Emacs.app which is 115 Mb). Of course comparison is not always fair since many apps are Universal binaries but I just want to make the point that adding Qt is not so a large commitment as it would appear. At this development stage you need to install Qt  yourself and then compile from SVN but when a stable version will be ready you will only need to download the app bundle without separately installing Qt (of course the price is that you will have duplicate libraries but this is common under Mac). So I believe that for some times the Qt port will be the only supported backend on the Mac (again there are some Mac-only features which already can be added to all the flavours of TeXmacs (X11,Qt,Cocoa) such as internal PDF conversion and spell-checking).

I will be eager to use it once there is a cocoa port one day.

Me too.

best

max

Currently the Qt version works fine under Mac. I use it everyday and apart from some still unimplemented features (like the graphical mode) it does not have major bugs. The makefile has also a target to produce a full-fledged .app bundle (make BUNDLE) which is relocatable. We are working hard to finalize the Qt port which is our main priority for the moment. Personally I would also like to have a native Cocoa version but the development of this particular backend is for the moment suspended since we are too few to disperse ourselves in too many projects. A reasonable goal is to finish and stabilize the Qt port and then maybe update the Cocoa port. For the moment however the Cocoa port should be considered suspendend and I'm not even trying to keep it compilable. Note that the Qt port can take advantage of the Mac environment by using the native spell-checker or the native PS/PDF conversion (thus without requiring ghostscript or ispell to be installed).

Note that currently TeXmacs/Qt version compile under Snow Leopard but it shows some non-critical bugs due to the different Qt version needed (4.6-beta). Most of the development of the Qt port takes place under Mac 10.5 with Qt 4.4.3 so if you want to try I would suggest you to install this particular version of Qt.


Best,
Massimiliano