What is TeXworks?
An environment for authoring TeX (LaTeX, ConTeXt, etc) documents, with a Unicode-based, TeX-aware editor, integrated PDF viewer, and a clean, simple interface accessible to casual and non-technical users.
TeXworks is inspired by Dick Koch's award-winning TeXShop program for Mac OS X, which has made quality typesetting through TeX accessible to a wider community of users, without a technical or intimidating face. The goal of TeXworks is to deliver a similarly integrated, easy-to-use environment for users on other platforms, especially GNU/Linux and Windows.
For more information, see the TeXworks page at the TeX Users Group site. There is also a mailing list available for discussion of the project.
Requirements
To build the current TeXworks prototype from source, you will need to install developer packages (or equivalent) for:
- Qt4 (4.3.2 is known to work; later versions should also work. Note that on GNU/Linux, TeXworks may crash when changing the spell-checking language when using Qt 4.3.x. Updating to Qt 4.4.0 solves this.)
http://trolltech.com/downloads/opensource#qt-open-source-edition
- Poppler (0.8.0 or later recommended, although 0.6 series should work)
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/
- Hunspell (at least 1.2.2 recommended; not tested with earlier versions)
http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/
- libdbus (on X11-based platforms only; not used on Mac OS X or Windows)
http://dbus.freedesktop.org/
along with their dependencies (such as Freetype, fontconfig, zlib, etc.) Details will depend on your platform. On GNU/Linux or similar systems, your package manager can probably provide all these. Feel free to contribute distribution-specific notes for the Building page.
After installing the necessary libraries (and their headers), check the TeXworks.pro file and update paths as necessary; some of the paths currently in the project file are specific to one of my build machines.
Once the project file is correct, run qmake to create a Makefile or Xcode project, and then run make or use Xcode to build the application. Do not run qmake -pro to recreate the .pro file, as it has been hand-edited.
Note: on some systems, the default qmake may be a Qt3 version, in which case it will generate lots of warnings, and make will fail miserably; TeXworks is a Qt4 program. In that case, see if you have qmake-qt4, or perhaps run the Qt4 version using a full path.
The current version of TeXworks has been successfully built with
- Xcode (using gcc 4) on Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5
- gcc 4 on GNU/Linux
- a combination of mingw32 on Windows XP and the mingw32 cross-compiler hosted on Mac OS X
Getting all the right libraries built and installed for the mingw32 build can be tricky. By slightly patching poppler 0.8.0, it is possible to build a version that does not depend on fontconfig (and thence on various other libraries), though it will then not work properly for PDFs with non-embedded fonts.
To avoid having to build the poppler dependencies for Windows, you can get precompiled libraries from the KDE on Windows project.
Alternatively, I believe it would also be possible to build with Visual C, but I have not done this personally.
