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.

Homepage: http://www.tug.org/texworks/ Development: http://code.google.com/p/texworks/ Bugs: http://code.google.com/p/texworks/issues/list Mailing list: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/texworks

License

TeXworks is copyright (C) 2007-2012 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.

Building TeXworks

Notes by Jonathan Kew, updated 2011-03-20 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://qt.nokia.com/downloads
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.

After installing the necessary libraries (and their headers), check the TeXworks.pro file and update paths as necessary; some of the paths currently in the project file are specific to one of my build machines.

Once the project file is correct, run qmake to create a Makefile or Xcode project, and then run make or use Xcode to build the application. Do not run "qmake -pro" to recreate the .pro file, as it has been hand-edited.

To build the scripting plugins, similarly check and edit the files plugins-src/TWLuaPlugin/TWLuaPlugin.pro and plugins-src/TWPythonPlugin/TWPythonPlugin.pro. Then run qmake in the respective directories and build the plugins using make or Xcode. Note that on some platforms and with certain configuartions, you need to build the scripting plugins before building the main application for the former to be picked up correctly.

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.
Getting all the right libraries built and installed for the mingw32 build can be
tricky.

To avoid having to build the poppler dependencies for Windows, you can get precompiled libraries from the KDE on Windows project.

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: