Others ⇒ TaylorType alpha testing needed!

[louis--taylor]

Hello everyone!
I have been writing a small LaTeX gui frontend for my father, who has
a limited computer literacy but needs to use LaTeX for his Phd thesis.
It is a small program written in python which will compile any LaTeX
document you give it with a single click. The emphasis is on a very
lightweight and simple gui, the only interaction happens in the system
tray, with two file selectors and a checkbox.

* It is is a small icon in the system tray, which can be configured to
compile any LaTeX document.
* It has some simple preferences, an option for different pdf viewers
will be added soon.
* It currently supports error messages for both LaTeX and BibTeX.
* It only runs on Linux (gnome)
* It uses gtk for the frontend and pure python for the backend.
* It depends on LaTeX, BibTeX and common gnome components. including
pynotify and gconf.

Since most of the people on this forum are experienced LaTeX
users, I was wondering If this is a useful program for LaTeX users,
and if anyone is interested in it being developed further.
Please give some feedback for this, and how to improve. The code is
currently very messy state and large some improvements.
Main code is hosted here: https://launchpad.net/taylortype
Website is: http://taylortype.sourceforge.net/

Cheers, Louis

[frabjous]

I'll give it a try, just out of curiousity, if nothing else.

I'm curious, however, why you don't just use whatever resources are provided by the editor your father is using? He must be using some text editor to create the thesis, which would either be a LaTeX specific IDE which will have its own compile button, or else a general purpose text editor like gedit, which has its own LaTeX plugin (as do the other common linux editors like vim and emacs).

[frabjous]

OK, tried it out. Generally it seems to work, though it's less convenient than just using the compile button in the editor.

I encountered two small problems.

1. I couldn't get BibTeX to work if the input and output directories were different. (I kept getting the error, "couldn't open file name `myfile.aux'.") Not really a big deal, since I would normally use the same directories.

2. I don't know if this is a "bug", but the tooltip is very misleading if you change preferences after using it. E.g., if I compile one file successfully, then change preferences to another file, if I hover the cursor over the green light, it reads "recompile oldfile.tex", whereas of course it would be more appropriate to read "compile newfile.tex".

Any plans for including Make Index in the future, or other methods of compiling (e.g., XeLaTeX or regular latex as opposed to pdflatex?). You might consider using, e.g., latexmk as the command run so that it can determine automatically whether BiBTeX is needed. (You might even give the option for it to run in "continuous mode" so that it recompiled whenever the source changed.)

Let me know if you want me to file bug reports at sourceforge.

[louis--taylor]

why you don't just use whatever resources are provided by the editor your father is using?

I was trying to support as many text editors as possible, so I kept the compiler separate from the text editor (my dad is using texmaker, and the compile button does not work as he would like it to).

Let me know if you want me to file bug reports at sourceforge.

This would be very very helpful, but I do all of the development on https://launchpad.net/taylortype, and only really use sourceforge for the webhosting. It would be appreciated immensely if you could report any bugs/problems/inconsistencies to the bug tracker and anything you think would be a good addition (e.g. your idea for XeLaTeX and latexmk) to the 'blueprints' tracker.

2. I don't know if this is a "bug", but the tooltip is very misleading if you change preferences after using it. E.g., if I compile one file successfully, then change preferences to another file, if I hover the cursor over the green light, it reads "recompile oldfile.tex", whereas of course it would be more appropriate to read "compile newfile.tex".

I hadn't thought of that, fixing now

Thank you very much for testing my (not very good) program.