Happy New Year 2011!
July 2010: Trial copy, 30 days, only $ 9.99 (US)!
October 2008: Color, Synchronicity, Traffic Light, more!
August 2007: Beta!
February 2007: Almost Beta!
9 March 2006: Textures® for OS X, Rosetta and Universal
We have had the opportunity in recent days to test Textures on the Intel Macintosh platform. We are pleased to report that Textures appears to work without problems under Rosetta (i.e., as interpreted PowerPC code); also, we have successfully compiled and run Textures as a Universal application with native Intel code. Although there are still some packaging issues, we believe this to be the last major hurdle before we can make the first preliminary version available to Textures owners. (There are minor problems with the Intel code, so the first version available will be PowerPC and Rosetta only; the Universal version will follow shortly.)
We know that many are interested in the performance of the Intel platform, so we report these times for native Textures to compile the 494 pages of The TeXbook: 1.33 seconds (G5 @ 2.0GHz); 1.1 seconds (MacBook Pro @ 1.83GHz).
More news soon ...
1 January 2006: Announcing Textures® for OS X
In the past few years the development of Textures for OS X has been one difficult stride after another.
Changes within the company, changes within the OS itself and many, many dead ends that consumed both time and energy, not to speak of creativity, were and continue to be at times what appear to be insurmountable issues.
So, it is with great pleasure that we are able to announce that very shortly we will offer our present customers the opportunity to begin to test, and to use, the first native version of Textures for OS X.
It is not by any measure a finished release (it doesn't even have its own icon!), but it is an effective framework for what Textures will become within this year. It lacks almost any user interface, and there are many, many things that it does not yet do, but it does allow you to edit, TeX, preview, and print standard TeX documents. We believe it to be reliable and dependable, and it is very quick.
As a small token of our appreciation for your patience and your loyalty to our products, we will distribute this initial version at no charge to current Textures owners. Soon, on this page, we will make the preliminary Textures application for OS X available for you to download; it requires no installer, and fits easily into your current Textures system.
If you keep in mind that this is only the beginning, we believe you will find the new Textures for OS X to be one of the most powerful TeX systems, reliable, easy to use, and an excellent performer.
Best wishes from all of us for a prosperous and peaceful New Year,
Chantal Colin-Chanel
Comptroller
Announcing Textures® 2.1.9
Department of Realistic Expectations:
Textures 2.1.9 is a prompt maintenance release for OS X Classic, to cure two problems introduced with OS X 10.4 (Tiger): problems with document icons, and problems with file “in use” warnings.
It is not an OS X native release.
The Textures 2.1.9 application is identical to the d5 version, now packaged on the CD-ROM. Purchasers of the 2.1.9 update will receive the CD-ROM and also an email copy of the Textures 2.1.9 application.
See here for information about Textures and OS X.
What's New in Textures 2.1.9d5
Tiger and Textures' document icons: Tiger breaks the document associations and icons for TEXT files for many applications, including Textures; this causes Textures documents to appear with other icons, for example those of OS X TextEdit. (This is obviously a bug in Tiger, and no doubt will be fixed in the future by Apple; we have found a method to cure it for Textures now.)
What's New in Textures 2.1.9d4
Tiger/Spotlight interaction - file “in use”: The new standard system search facility, Spotlight, interferes with Textures' writing of TeX files to disk storage. When Textures closes each new file, Spotlight automatically indexes the contents - but it keeps the file open briefly to do so. This temporary delay can cause Textures to believe that the file is “in use”, as indeed it is, by Spotlight! (It is possible to avoid this problem by putting the folders with your Textures documents into Spotlight's "Privacy" tab, so that Spotlight will not index them.) The symptoms of this interaction are most visible to LaTeX users in Flash Mode, where the user is continually disturbed by notices that Textures is having trouble with an .aux file in use.
Textures 2.1.9d4 closes newly created files in a way that avoids the interaction with Spotlight.
(What happened to 2.1.9d2 and d3? They existed only briefly; we tried one way to sidestep the problem, then we found a better method to fix the problem, then fixed a case we had overlooked ... our thanks to those who helped.)
What's New in Textures 2.1.9d1
Major performance enhancement: While analyzing performance of the TeX engine in OS X native Textures, we noticed that the Classic environment does not cache certain disk transfers as effectively as did OS 9; on the other hand, the OS X virtual memory environment allows us to improve Textures' internal caching to compensate for this difference. The effect of this caching improvement is substantial, roughly doubling Textures' typesetting speed for large documents. (!)
What's New in Textures 2.1.8
We have noticed an increase in users converting from the PC to the Macintosh. (!) To aid some of these users, we have extended Textures 2.1.8 to recognize the PC form of Encapsulated PostScript (EPSF) illustrations; a consequence is a performance improvement for all users of EPSF illustrations.
What's New in Textures 2.1.6 and 2.1.7
Features
- online registration
- open all file types
[1] The major new feature in Textures 2.1.6 is online registration: when Textures is installed, it communicates via the Internet with our registration server to verify the activation key and serial number in real time.
We have gone to considerable effort to ensure that the process is effortless and transparent, so much so that we are sure that most users will see no change in the installation process. An Internet connection is required for automatic installation; if a live connection is not available, the registration can be confirmed and activated via email or telephone. No personal information is transmitted by the installation process, and no further automatic communication is initiated by Textures once it has been installed.
The online registration process is part of our continuing efforts to keep our prices low. We anticipate using a similar mechanism in future versions to provide automatic notice, and perhaps even installation, of updates as they become available.
[2] With OS X, the concept of "file types" has become sufficiently confused so as to become more trouble than it is worth for simple text files. (This is unfortunate indeed, but we have no ability to fix the problem ourselves.) So, with Textures 2.1.6, any kind of file may be dragged to the Textures icon, in Finder windows or in the OS X Dock, and Textures will therefore open any type of file as if it were a text file. (If it's not a text file, it is likely to be unreadable gibberish, but no damage will be done.)
[2a] Textures 2.1.7 extends this to Option/Open: hold the Option key while choosing Open (from the File menu) and Textures will display all files and allow any type to be selected.
Packaging
- Feature and Installation Guide PDF files
- hyperref package preinstalled
[1] The Textures 2.1.6 CD-ROM contains PDF versions of the Textures 2.1 Feature and Installation Guides, so that all of the documentation is now provided in machine-readable form.
[2] The 'hyperref' package is now automatically installed.
Bugs (fixed)
- Installer and OS X
- working directories
- Show Fonts and untitled documents
[1] With OS X, some of our overseas users have reported that the Installer failed to recognize the Textures CD-ROM. This was apparently due to the presence of the ® character in the name of the disk itself, which caused encoding problems so that the disk was not recognized. We have renamed the Textures CD-ROM to cure this problem.
[2] Textures 2.1.6 closes working directories after use. This cures a previous problem wherein a directory could remain open unknown to the user, preventing the deletion of that folder or dismounting of a disk containing that folder until Textures itself was quit.
[3] Textures 2.1.6 correctly accumulates font statistics for untitled documents. Previous versions would not clean up correctly when untitled documents were closed, causing the spurious display of fonts no longer in use.
The Textures 2.1.8 CD is available to all Textures owners
Prices (plus shipping) are:
- $25/copy to current Textures 2.1 owners;
- $109 upgrade to Textures 2.0 owners;
- $159 upgrade to owners of Textures 1.8 or older versions.
Please include your serial number with your order. We will issue a new activation key with your new CD for major upgrades; minor updates (such as 2.1 to 2.1.8) use the same key.
We have a new address:
Blue Sky TeX Systems
PO Box 80424
Portland, OR 97280
Email to 'sales@bluesky.com' and 'help@bluesky.com' is the best way to reach us for orders and technical assistance.
Free Euro Fonts available
Adobe Systems makes available a free set of typefaces with the new Euro currency symbol here: Fonts (for your System/Fonts folder); Textures metrics are available from our FTP server here: Metrics to be placed in your TeX Fonts folder. The Euro fonts come in Serif, Sans-serif, and Monospaced faces, with bold, italic, and bold italic variants. The Textures metrics have names (such as 'zpeur') to match those of the 'europs' package available from CTAN. Our thanks to Professor Gerald Tenenbaum for alerting us to these free fonts.
Free Textures.Free demonstration package available
Textures.Free is available! As you might expect from the name, it's free and may be freely distributed. What is it? Textures.Free is our demonstration version of Textures, so that you can show your friends and colleagues how easy Textures is to install and use, and how Flash Mode and Synchronicity and all the other features work.
It's just like Textures (it -is- Textures), except — Textures.Free will only produce the first page of any TeX document. As it can be used to preview and print documents of any size, it replaces our Textures Viewer application.
See http://www.bluesky.com/free/index.html for more information, and to download your free copy!
Best regards,
Blue Sky TeX Systems