MacTeX is a product produced by the MacTeX TeXnical working group of the TeX Users Group (TUG). It is the Macintosh component of the TeX Collection DVD, the reference edition of TeX distributed by TeX User Groups across the world. The reference edition runs on Mac OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, various BSD Unix systems, and most other computer architectures.

MacTeX consists of two pieces: MacTeX-2011 and MacTeXtras. MacTeX-2011 is an install package which installs everything needed to run TeX on Mac OS X. The package uses Apple's standard installer; installation takes four to eight minutes and is automatic. MacTeXtras is a collection of optional extras: Additional Front Ends, Spell Checkers, Documentation, and Showcase items.

Wow. Showcase of beautiful typography done in TeX

Notes on math courses in TeX.

Some basic information and advice on taking notes with TeX.

The TeXworks project is an effort to build a simple TeX front-end program (working environment) that will be available for all today’s major desktop operating systems—in particular, MS Windows (XP/Vista/7), typical GNU/Linux distros and other X11-based systems, as well as Mac OS X. It is deliberately modeled on Dick Koch’s award-winning TeXShop for Mac OS X, which is credited with a resurgence of TeX usage on the Mac platform.

To provide a similar experience across all systems, TeXworks is based on cross-platform, open source tools and libraries. The Qt toolkit was chosen for the quality of its cross-platform user interface capabilities, with native “look and feel” on each platform being a realistic target. Qt also provides a rich application framework, facilitating the relatively rapid development of a usable product.

The normal TeXworks workflow is PDF-centric, using pdfTeX and XeTeX as typesetting engines and generating PDF documents as the default formatted output. Although it is possible to configure a processing path based on DVI, newcomers to the TeX world need not be concerned with DVI at all, but can generally treat TeX as a system that goes directly from marked-up text files to ready-to-use PDF documents.

TeXworks includes an integrated PDF viewer, based on the Poppler library, so there is no need to switch to an external program such as Acrobat, xpdf, etc., to view the typeset output. The integrated viewer also supports source/preview synchronization (e.g., control-click within the source text to locate the corresponding position in the PDF, and vice versa). This capability is based on the “SyncTeX” feature developed by Jérôme Laurens, and supported by both the pdfTeX and XeTeX programs in TeX Live and other current distributions.

LaTeX Editor, called later LEd, is an environment for rapid TeX and LaTeX document development. It is free to use, however, donations act as a catalyst for its develompent.

LaTeX Editor is designed to work on Windows® 95/98/Me/NT4/2000/XP/2003/Vista operating systems. LEd's capabilities vary according to the operating system used, e.g., Visual Styles from Windows® XP. It, however, works with almost all functionality also on Windows® 95.

LEd offers a project manager, powerful editor, integrated spellchecker and thesaurus, build-in DVI viewer, descriptive hints for LaTeX commands, code complete mechanism, word wrapping, code folding, multilingual environment, and more. Nevertheless, LaTeX Editor is a small program. The whole package without thesauri data occupies only 6 MB of disk space, while the fully functional version for one language needs about 2.0 MB. Please go to the more about page if you are interested in a more detailed description of LEd.

Gummi is a LaTeX editor for the Linux platform, written in C/GTK+. It was designed with simplicity in mind, but hopes to appeal to both novice and more advanced LaTeX writers. Gummi was released as free opensource software under the MIT license.

GNU TeXmacs is a free wysiwyw (what you see is what you want) editing platform with special features for scientists. The software aims to provide a unified and user friendly framework for editing structured documents with different types of content (text, graphics, mathematics, interactive content, etc.). The rendering engine uses high-quality typesetting algorithms so as to produce professionally looking documents, which can either be printed out or presented from a laptop.

The software includes a text editor with support for mathematical formulas, a small technical picture editor and a tool for making presentations from a laptop. Moreover, TeXmacs can be used as an interface for many external systems for computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics, etc. New presentation styles can be written by the user and new features can be added to the editor using the Scheme extension language. A native spreadsheet and tools for collaborative authoring are planned for later.

TeXmacs runs on all major Unix platforms and Windows. Documents can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml or Scheme format and printed as Postscript or Pdf files. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and Html/Mathml.