Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 20:00:01 -0400
Subject: MacOSX-TeX Digest #96 - 09/07/01
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MacOSX-TeX Digest #96 - Friday, September 7, 2001

  Re: [Mac OS X TeX] OS X a nightmare?
          by "John Vokey" 
  xdvi, TeXShop, and teTeX
          by "Nicholas Riley" 


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Subject: Re: [Mac OS X TeX] OS X a nightmare?
From: "John Vokey" 
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 18:55:16 -0600

on 9/6/01 6:00 PM, David Wagner wrote:

> I suggest that for off topic posts such as this one, we direct our =
replies
> directly to the original poster, rather than to the list. I have already
> done so myself, and I believe that this post has had enough answers.  My
> email is busy enough as it is.
> 
> David Wagner

I disagree.  First, David can reduce the email clutter by switching to
digest mode.  Second, these observations *are* important.  I've been using
Apple computers since the original Apple ][, and OS X *is* unintuitive,
slow, cluttered (in terms of the number of files associated with just =
about
anything), ugly, 'nix-like to a large fault, and, to put it bluntly, a =
royal
pain...  To this point, all I can say is that it is not yet "ready for =
prime
time".  BUT: It will be, possibly as early as the next relase (although I
doubt it), and more likely with 11.x, by which point we will all have
switched.  Until then, though, it is precisely these observations that =
will
encourage the TeX on Mac OS X developers to ensure that, despite the =
current
problems, those that do make the transition will find their TeX =
experiences,
at least, to be an *improvement* over previous Mac OSs.  Otherwise, we
should all just admit defeat, install LinuxPPC, and be done with it.

John R. Vokey


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Subject: xdvi, TeXShop, and teTeX
From: "Nicholas Riley" 
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 01:40:11 -0500

Hi,

I'm just getting up and running with TeX on OS X.  I tried the Fink
package of teTeX, but I could never get it to work.  So I installed
the teTeX from TeXShop, which seems a lot better.  However, I am
having difficulties with its font rendering (see below).  Also, the
previewer is nowhere near as flexible as xdvi (no zooming, no keyboard
navigation, you can't even drag to move around).  Not that I'm
praising xdvi's interface - it's confusing as anything - but it is
quite flexible.

So I tried to compile xdvi.  First I tried the Fink package.  It
doesn't consult kpathsea for path info, seemingly, so that was out.
Then I found xdvik .  It uses
kpathsea - well, sort of.  It comes with its own versions of kpathsea
and libwww which are strange and incompatible with teTeX's kpathsea
and current libwww versions.  It has a mechanism to specify another
libwww, but only an old version of libwww; and no mechanism to specify
another kpathsea.  So I spent about two hours hacking on xdvik to get
it to use the installed kpathsea and libwww.  It wes not really much
fun.  But now it works.

So, two questions:

First, is there another version of xdvi that installs more easily and
works better with TeXShop's version of teTeX?  I use a lot of graphics
from Mathematica so I need eps rendering.

I'd like to use TeXShop where possible, but when I use "Tex and
Ghostscript", the fonts appear mangled in either TeXShop's preview or
Acrobat Reader.  With "Pdftex", most fonts appear OK, but fonts
embedded as bitmaps only show up properly in Acrobat Reader, not with
OS X's PDF rendering.  Strangely, it's vice versa - the fonts that
aren't in my OS X system but only are present as .pfa/.pfb files
(e.g. Times Roman Small Caps) show up fine with ps2pdf, but not with
pdftex; the fonts that are installed look fine with pdftex, but not
with ps2pdf.  Is there any way to get all of my fonts to look OK from
within TeXShop?

Thanks,

-- 
=3DNicholas Riley  | =


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