Textures 2.2.0b preliminary release

Welcome to native Textures for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and OS X 10.5 (Leopard). This is a Universal binary, for both the PowerPC and Intel Macintosh platforms. Although this is a preliminary release, we believe it can be expected to be functional and dependable in regular use. We wish to be clear, however, that Textures remains (very!) far from feature-complete: many major features are missing, the user interface remains woefully incomplete, and the beta stage will be an extended period of constant development. A prudent level of caution with each new release is advised.

With the 2.2.0b6 beta release, we reintroduced the popular Traffic Light, the Textures facility that continuously shows you the TeX status of your documents while you type. If the light is green, TeX is happy; if the light turns red, there's a problem. As soon as you fix it, the light turns green again. (The light turns yellow while TeX is working, but Textures is so fast you'll rarely see it.)

The previous Textures 2.2.0b5 (beta) is now frozen, and will continue to be free to current (2.1) Classic Textures owners; see below for upgrade policy announcements. If you do not own Textures 2.1, you can buy an individual copy of Textures 2.2 via the Google Checkout link below, for the current beta price of $149 (US), which includes all updates up to and including the release version:

If you already own Classic Textures 2.1, you can upgrade to Textures 2.2 by downloading the latest Textures 2.2 beta via the link at the top of this page; when you launch Textures 2.2, it will automatically take open a browser window to Google Checkout to allow you to purchase the upgrade activation key.

TeX Log can be searched and saved; the window name indicates the most recent contents.

TFM binary metrics are supported; this allows Textures to share TeX Font Metric files with other TeX installations. (Just put an alias into Textures' Metrics folder.) [NB: this facility should be regarded as experimental, as other font metadata necessary to support correct display and printing are not translated. Yet.]

Textures 2.2.0b8 includes Find (search) functions. (The Traffic Light is also included!)

[What happened to 2.2.0b7? It was a limited-availability release made available to selected customers who indicated an interest in certain technical experiments.]

Classic Textures 2.1 owners must upgrade. We have reached the point in the development of native Textures where we believe that the large majority of current Classic Textures documents are reliably supported by native Textures, so that all Classic Textures users can switch to the 2.2.0b5 beta version with full document functionality¹.

Therefore, although the frozen 2.2.0b5 beta version will continue to be freely available to Classic Textures 2.1 owners, to activate new development releases of Textures 2.2 it will be necessary to purchase a new activation key at an upgrade price. The upgrade price is initially set at $99 (US); it is likely to rise in the future as development progresses.

We remember, with gratitude, that many of our customers have purchased upgrades and new copies of Textures during the development period of the last five years, and that we promised to credit those purchasers toward the cost of the upgrade to Textures 2.2 when it became available. We believe that our automatic upgrade process will correctly indicate this credit and offer a free or reduced price activation key where appropriate; should this not appear to be the case, we will be happy to review individual cases and make corrections if necessary.

¹[There are two cases, HTML links and PostScript primitive inclusions, which are not supported in the 2.2.0b5 beta; some HTML facilities will be available soon, but general PostScript inclusions are not likely to ever be supported. Note that EPS PostScript illustrations are supported.]

Line endings are now automatically corrected to Macintosh (CR only); this corrects some confusing anomalies in the text editor. Any corrected line endings are saved if/when the file is saved, not otherwise.

Reliability improvements, to correct a handful of cases in which Textures could crash. (Although we are not yet ready to reinstate our offer of cash prizes for reproducible crashes, Textures has proven to be generally reliable in regular use.)

Classic Textures typeset material is by default no longer opened if it exists, as this proved to be confusing. If desired, this can be reenabled by a defaults command, see Preferences in Old News, below.

Classic Textures 2.1 upgrades to Textures 2.2 can now be purchased directly from within Textures itself.

New Icons, for Textures itself and some of its documents. Documents created by Textures can be opened by double-clicking. You may also notice improvements in window management.

Color \special support allows TeX jobs to control the color of elements of typeset pages. The available commands are the same as Classic Textures, so existing colored documents will now display and print:

Synchronicity now cross-links TeX text and typeset views. Just command/click takes you back and forth between text and typeset pages. Try it! (It's easier to see it working than to describe it.)

Spell Checking is now available in text windows; right-click to enable. Note that cocoAspell has better support for TeX than the standard OS X spellchecker.

Text Font is now available in the Edit menu. (It will be more useful when Textures remembers it!)

Performance: we are pleased to say that the performance of TeX itself has not been significantly reduced by Synchronicity. (There is a measurable difference, on the order of 10–20 percent.)

If you have a current Classic Textures 2.1 installation (PowerPC): this native Textures will use the same fonts and activation key. We suggest placing an alias to your current TeX Fonts folder into the folder

This will allow Textures 2.2 to find your current metrics and macros. (These Inputs and Metrics folders will be automatically created when Textures 2.2 is first launched, but you will have to create the aliases yourself.)

Please note that these folder names may be localized, e.g., /Library/Fonts in France may become /Bibliotheque/Polices.

If you do not have a current Classic Textures 2.1 installation: (this will be true for all Intel Macintosh systems) drag the Computer Modern folder into your /Library/Fonts folder. It will be necessary to enter your serial number and activation key; it will also be necessary to have an Internet connection to request an installation key from the bluesky.com server.

If you need TeX macros, classes, style files, etc.: the 2.2.0b disk image does not include the usual TeX input files, e.g., the LaTeX packages, macros, styles, classes, and so forth. You can download the Classic Textures folder of these files here:

Textures 2.2.0b will be updated frequently; please check this page. (At some point soon we expect to enable automatic update checks.)

Our current priorities are interface improvement, both cosmetic and functional, including the traffic light and document context memory.

We will pay attention to email as to which function and interface improvements will be most useful in your work; please send suggestions to suggest@bluesky.com, and crash logs to crash@bluesky.com. Please include an identifiable subject email header so that our spam filters will be pacified. Alas, it will not be possible for us to respond directly.

We wish to express our profound gratitude and appreciation for your patience, and for the many expressions of support and encouragement we have received in the years of work on this project.

Virtual (VF) fonts are now supported in full; this is particularly relevant for LaTeX and AMS formats. (We believe the implementation to be generally correct, but would not be surprised to still find difficulties with particular fonts, and would appreciate notice of any such problems.)

Save on Quit/Close is now secure, so that Textures will not allow you to close modified documents without confirmation. (There are still complexities that can arise when an external editor has modified a document which is also modified within Textures.)

Preferences are minimally available for some defaults, as example see the following Terminal commands:

Cosmetic improvements have been made in a number of interface details, so that more interface controls work as they should. (There is obviously a great deal still to do here.)

Performance: we are pleased to say that the performance of TeX itself has been further improved, so that typical times to compile the 494 pages of The TeXbook are, e.g., 1.05 seconds on a G5 (2.0GHz) and 0.87 seconds on a MacBook Pro (1.83GHz).

Old Old News: the previous history of Textures 2.2.0a can be read here; it is recommended reading for new users, particularly for the description of the external editor interface and the \special commands for graphics.