the texworks project is an effort to build a simple tex frontend program (working environment) that will be available for all today’s major desktop operating systems—in particular, ms windows (xp and vista), typical gnu/linux distros and other x11based systems, and mac os x. it is deliberately modeled on dick koch’s awardwinning texshop for mac os x, which is credited with a resurgence of tex usage on the mac platform.
to provide a similar experience across all systems, texworks is based on crossplatform, open source tools and libraries. the qt toolkit was chosen for the quality of its crossplatform user interface capabilities, with native “look and feel” on each platform being a realistic target. qt also provides a rich application framework, facilitating the relatively rapid development of a usable product.
the normal texworks workflow is pdfcentric, using pdftex and xetex as typesetting engines and generating pdf documents as the default formatted output. although it is possible to configure a processing path based on dvi, newcomers to the tex world need not be concerned with dvi at all, but can generally treat tex as a system that goes directly from markedup text files to readytouse pdf documents.
texworks includes an integrated pdf viewer, based on the poppler library, so there is no need to switch to an external program such as acrobat, xpdf, etc., to view the typeset output. the integrated viewer also supports source/preview synchronization (e.g., controlclick within the source text to locate the corresponding position in the pdf, and vice versa). this capability is based on the new “synctex” feature developed by jérôme laurens, and supported by both the pdftex and xetex programs in tex live and other current releases.
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