After the beta release of 3.31 in October 2009 the actual Version 3.31 of the TeX/LaTeX-IDE WinShell has been released by Ingo H. de Boer yesterday. WinShell runs on Windows systems and provides project management, syntax highlighting, spell checking, BibTeX support, Unicode support, toolbars and many options.

New features of 3.31 compared to 3.30 are

• autocompletion for LaTeX commands and BibTeX labels,
• an update checker,
• splitting and joining of paragraphs,
• an option to enable or disable the BibTeX front-end,
• optional reloading of opened files at startup.

Further it’s using Scintilla 2.03 now and the BibTeX project window has been improved.

You can download it here or visit the WinShell Homepage for more information.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Today version 2.31 of TeXShop has been released. TeXShop is a free and open source TeX editor and previewer for Mac OS X written by Richard Koch. The new version requires at least System 10.4 (Tiger) but System 10.5 (Leopard) is strongly recommended.

Some of the changes in 2.31:

• The “goto error” feature has been improved. Now it’s highlighting the text right before the error (like reported by the TeX compiler) instead of an entire line containing the error making it easier to spot errors, especially when “soft wrapping” is used.
• The bug concerning the incorrectly drawn toolbar has been fixed as well as other known bugs.
• TeXshow now comes with a new SageTeX engine that’s easier to install and more efficient.
• Now the “Abort” command works also when ConTeXt is called. That bug of the previous version was fixed by using bash instead of tcsh as scripting language for the internal calling script.
• The typesetting can be canceled by a new menu item “Abort Typesetting”, a keyboard shortcut is provided too.
• Closing the preview window now closes also the pdf file. In previous versions closing the entire document or even quitting TeXshop itself had been necessary for it.
• Help sections, latexmk and French localization were slightly improved.
• The defective default KeyEquivalents.plist has been repaired.

To obtain further information visit

• the complete list of changes in 2.31,
• the download page,
• the TeXshop homepage.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Hideo Umeki has published the version 5.1 of the geometry package. 5.1 brings just a bugfix for the pass option, but the version 5, released a few days earlier on Feb 12th, provides some new and very useful features:

• The page dimensions can be changed now even in the middle of a document. This very often requested feature has been provided by the gmeometric package before. Now you could write \newgeometry{…} similar to \geometry except that all geometry options used in the preamble would be disabled and the paper-size options like paper=a4paper, landscape, portrait etc. too. Those preamble settings can be restored by \restoregeometry.
• The current page dimensions can be saved by \savegeometry and loaded by \loadgeometry.
• There’s a new set of options to specify the layout area: layout, layoutsize, layoutwidth,
  layoutheight etc. They help to print the specified layout to paper of a different size. For example the geometry package would use A5 layout for calculation of margins but with the paper size A4 if you use a4paper together with layout=a5paper.
• The new driver option xetex has been added and is strongly recommended with XeLaTeX. The driver auto-detection routine has been improved, the workaround with geometry.cfg in TeX Live is no longer necessary.
• Papersize presets b0j to b6j for JIS (Japanese Industrial Standards) B-series have been added.
• If the margin would not be completely specified version 5 behaves differently now in order to determine the unspecified margin, documented in the manual.
• The option showframe will cause the page frames to be shown on every page.
• The new option showcrop would print cropmarks showing the corners of the layout on every page.
• Loading geometry.cfg precedes now the processing of the class options in contrary to the previous versions.
• The options compat2 and twosideshift have been removed because version 5 is no longer compatible with previous versions.

For more information visit

• changes.txt for a list of changes and version history,
• the geometry manual,
• the package information on CTAN,
• the geometry package directory on CTAN.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

On Feb 15th the Version 3.05 of KOMA-Script has been released by Markus Kohm. 3.04 has been the most recent release for many months and is rated as very stable by the author, but know some improvements have led to the new release. These include extensions in scrlttr2, the new pseudolengths firstheadhpos and firstfoothpos, improvements in scrhack and a correction in tocbasic.

For further information and download visit

• the announcement in Markus’ blog,
• the release page for 3.05
• and the hosting BerliOS-Project.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

The version 1.9.9 of the free LaTeX editor Texmaker has been released yesterday. Texmaker is now providing additionally:

• verbatim support in the syntax highlighting,
• shortcuts for the “next/previous latex error” commands,
• an “escape” shortcut to close the “find” panel,
• a new option for the user tags (see changelog or documentation),
• quick change of shortcuts by pressing the key sequence directly,
• inclusion of the blocks of a beamer document in the structure view.

The complete changelog can be found here. Click here for downloading versions for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows or source files.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.