About the Mac OS X TeX Toolbox

The idea for this meta-project comes from the MacTeX TWG, a group of people working on TeX on the Mac under the aegis of the TeX Users Group. The direct reason for me to get involved was the fact that there were four equation editors out there, each offering roughly the same functionality — and replicating some bugs in early releases. This seemingly needless duplication of effort is such a waste of time — time better spent on adding new features to interesting tools.

I contacted the authors of the four tools, and their reaction was generally positive. I also asked why they hadn't built on top of the other programs already available. One stated that the licensing terms of the other tool he initially had altered wasn't clear enough to release it [1]. Another author was afraid that open-sourcing his tool would ‘force’ him to support his creation, eating up time he doesn’t have [2]. Neither of these two developers had heard of the large Mac OS X TeX community around the Mac-TeX web site and the mailing list hosted there. All users are recommended to join this list, and I think developers should at least be lurking there to listen to their users, and possibly provide some support.

Update (May first, 2006): A fifth candidate appeared on the scene. Sigh. Tells you either how succesful this site is, or how little time I have makeing noise over here. I'll point the author to this site, and ask for a reaction.

Project goals and methods

This project itself got underway thanks to a message from Jérôme Laurens, of iTeXMac fame. Together we formulated the goals for this meta-project:

An open TeX developers mailing list for discussion about programming techniques and solutions to common problems.
- No re-inventing the wheel, to avoid the “Equation Editor” situation.
- A possible first step for new developers joining existing and creating new projects.
A place on the web to tie this all together. The web site should provide the following:
- Describe existing projects from a developers point of view (interfaces to the program, descriptions of re-usable parts, etc.).
- List roadmaps for existing projects and areas to be improved, inviting new developers to “jointly scratch their itches”.
- Suggestions for new projects, both by end-users and as invitation to other developers.
- Public feature requests and user interface suggestions — users are usually better at user interface design than programmers, a matter of distance to the subject at hand.
- Provide articles describing certain problems, for instance the way the escape sequence for TeX is handled in Japanese [3].
- Provide help on setting up and maintaining your project.

Rules for participation

These communications and past experiences have led to some simple requirements to participate in this project. Joining the mailing list is free to all.

Your project must be open source — that is the sources must be released in conformance with the Open source definition. The reason is obvious: to avoid duplicate work, the sources must be available for re-use in other tools. This requirement leads to a problem right away, as two high-profile applications (iTeXMac and BibDesk) use the GPL and BSD license respectively. The terms of these two licenses may clash [4]. Such clashes are expected to be resolved by the authors in a friendly fashion.
It is strongly recommended that the project uses a public repository for the source code. From personal experience I know that a ‘live’ file repository is much more inviting for contributing authors, because they know that those sources are current, and that they do not run the risk of contributing to a part of the source that has just been made obsolete.
A participating project puts the project logo in its about box or in its help, inviting other developers to contribute to the participating projects. It is assumed that someone willing to start a new project will first look around to see what is out there, and find one of the other tools, which hopefully leads him or her to this place. The logo is available in various formats (including LaTeX, but that requires the Lucida typeface for now).
The lead developer subscribes to the mailing list, to make it easier to reach him or her.

Footnote 1 TeXType was originally based on the LaTeX Equation Editor — just adding support for Linkback — but the license wasn’t clear enough, and the author of LEE didn’t respond to questions, so Yuji Tachikawa wrote his own tool.
Footnote 2 I disagree with this reasoning in two different ways: There is no such thing as support for open source software, unless the author chooses to devliver it — for pay if he wants to. On the other hand if you publish a program, you can be sure that others will come to depend on it. This means you’ll have make sure those users can eiter help themselves or get your support. On a closed source project the author has to deliver — possibly for an indefinite period. However, if a tool is open source, it becomes much easier to either tell the users to help themselves, since they can take the source and ask another programmer to take over. It also becomes a lot easier to share the load with others.
Footnote 3 In most languages the escape sequence in TeX is the backslash (\). In the traditional Japanese text-encoding the Yen symbol (¥) is located at this code-point, and this is used instead. So documents typically start with ¥documentclass — books tell you to do things this way. However, with unicode as a basis, and saving to an 8-bit encoding, you're asking for trouble, and special care is needed for TeX-tools to work for users in Japan.
Footnote 4 Apparently it is possible to use BSD code in GPL licensed applications, but the reverse is not true, uless you get permission from the original authors. I am not a lawyer, please have a look at what others are using, and choose something that is compatible. Try to limit yourself to the two that are already in use: GPL and BSD, or place your code in the public domain.