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2 responses to “Blast from the Past”

1. 2007/04/27

   Chris

   re: Blast from the Past

   They took most of the “fun” out.

   Just get iTeXMac. If you thought teTeX had made installation easy (and compared to predecessors, it *did*) you’ll be pleased.

   For another blast from the past, install R ;^)

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2. 2010/10/12

   Maynard Handley

   If you are still interested in this, seriously the only distribution worth installing is TeX Live. It is maintained by TUG, is updated on a specific annual schedule, and seems to contain every good idea from other distros. In particular it does a really nice job of installing the scary bit in some place where they don’t conflict with anything else, while dumping the user visible bits in /Applications/TeX. When you update your distro in a year, you will find a nice Prefs Pane that allows you to switch between, say, the 2009 and 2010 distros; and that the 2009 and 2010 distros are placed in distinct directories, so that once you are happy with 2010, you can drag 2009 into the trash (or rm -Rf it).

   Beyond that, I’m a great fan of LyX. God knows it’s not perfect — it uses one of these awful cross-platform libraries, so nothing behaves quite like a Mac app should, and it crashes every few days. On the plus side, it does an adequate job of auto-saving, so the crashes are more irritating than tragedy; and it is very customizable. Not as much as I would like, but better than you’d expect from a GUI app. I was able, for example, to
   – rip out most of the toolbars, and replace them with one toolbar of the buttons I actually care about
   – rewrite many of the menus and command-keys
   – rig it up to understand my personal collection of LaTeX macros so that I can choose eg “rant” from a menu and have the TeX wrap the selected code with \rant, while the UI displays the text in a similar form (smaller font, sans serifs; or whatever)
   – also rig up the input system so that I can use Mathematica style greek input (esc-a-esc for alpha, etc).

   It’s not perfect — I could not, for example, get Mathematica style root or super/sub-script — but it strikes by the far the best balance I am aware of between given you all the control you want from TeX along with the convenience and easy proofing of a GUI.

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