/texworks

Main codebase

Primary LanguageC++GNU General Public License v2.0GPL-2.0

About TeXworks

TeXworks is an environment for authoring TeX (LaTeX, ConTeXt, etc) documents, with a Unicode-based, TeX-aware editor, integrated PDF viewer, and a clean, simple interface accessible to casual and non-technical users.

TeXworks is inspired by Dick Koch's award-winning TeXShop program for Mac OS X, which has made quality typesetting through TeX accessible to a wider community of users, without a technical or intimidating face. The goal of TeXworks is to deliver a similarly integrated, easy-to-use environment for users on other platforms, especially GNU/Linux and Windows.

Further Information

If you find any bugs/problems or have any recommendations, don't hesitate to stop by the development webpage, send a mail to the mailing list (preferably via the "Help > Email to mailing list" menu item which automatically includes some debug information), or file a bug report.

License

TeXworks is copyright (C) 2007-2015 by Jonathan Kew, Stefan Löffler, and Charlie Sharpsteen. Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING for details.

The SyncTeX code is copyright (c) 2008-2011 by Jérôme Laurens; see src/synctex_parser.c for license details.

Building TeXworks

Notes by Jonathan Kew, updated 2011-03-20 and 2015-03-29 by Stefan Löffler

To build TeXworks from source, you will need to install developer packages (or equivalent) for:

  • Qt4 (4.5.2 or later is recommended, although the application may build with versions as old as 4.3.x. Note that on GNU/Linux, TeXworks may crash when changing the spell-checking language when using Qt 4.3.x. Updating to at least Qt 4.4.0 solves this.)
    http://www.qt.io/download/

  • Poppler (using the latest stable release, currently 0.16, is strongly recommended, although versions as old as the 0.6 series should still work)
    http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

  • Hunspell (release 1.2.8 or later is recommended; earlier 1.2.x releases may be used, although support for some non-Latin-script languages may be lacking)
    http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/

along with their dependencies (such as Freetype, fontconfig, zlib, etc.) If you also want to build the scripting plugins (optional), you additionally need development packages for Lua and/or Python. Details will depend on your platform. On Linux or similar systems, your package manager can probably provide all these.

Once everything is set up, create a folder for building (e.g., "build") and run CMake in it to create a Makefile or Xcode project. Finally, run make or use Xcode to build the application.

The current TeXworks prototype has been successfully built with

  • Xcode (using gcc 4) on Mac OS X (built on 10.5, but should run on 10.4 or later)
  • MinGW release 5.1.4 on Windows XP (also runs on Vista and Windows 7)
  • gcc 4 on GNU/Linux, various BSDs, etc.

On the Mac, required libraries can be obtained, e.g., using Homebrew.

Further tips on building TeXworks from source are available on some of the wiki pages: