Mac OS X TeX Toolbox

Welcome to the “Mac OS X TeX Toolbox” umbrella project. The aim of this project is to co-ordinate and stimulate the development of TeX-related tools and utilities for Mac OS X. The history behind this project is detailed on the about-page.

Basically we’re here to help you avoid duplicating work that others have done already: there are only so many hours in a day, and spending those hours replicating a tool that has been written already seems just a waste.

News

The mailing list is open to subscriptions, and can be found over here. The first posts can be read in the archives.

Since you can read this, you must have noticed that we’re now hosted on Sourceforge.net.

What can you do?

The soul of this project isn’t software, it is you: someone who wants to help out in creating great tools for TeX on Mac OS X, whether you have some knowledge in programming, TeX’ing or translating. All of the participating projects are understaffed [1], and will gladly accept your help with the following tasks, and other help as well. In no particular order:

Writing documentation.
Testing.
User interface design & suggestions for improvements.
Graphic design, web-design.
TeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt expertise for templates and macros.
Call sequences and other TeX-nical applications, in script languages or on the command-line.
Oh, and most projects could do with extra programming help, most likely in Cocoa/Objective-C, but other languages (C/C++, perl, python, ruby, …) are also in demand, especially if you manage to solve a problem in them.

If you use TeX or LaTeX on Mac OS X, and there is something missing from the tools you currently have, you may have what is called “an itch”. Itches are there to be scratched, and this is commonly seen as the starting point for most open source applications. The great thing about open source tools is that you can resolve your own itches, and get them into the main tool — rather than writing your own tool from scratch.

Footnote 1 In my experience at least most of them are, and many important tasks that do not require programming skills are often ignored. Non-programmers can help in very important ways, like telling us what they'd like to use.