The version 3.30 of WinShell has been released on Monday this week. WinShell is a LaTeX Editor with Unicode support, spellchecking (Hunspell), project environment, configurable toolbars, syntax highlighting and provides many more features.

Some the new features of the version 3.30 are

• SyncTeX/Sumatra PDF support,
• improved UTF8 support for the spell checker,
• update to Hunspell 1.2.8, Scintilla 1.77,
• BibTeX front-end,
• a pdfLaTeX optimized toolbar,
• Linux support by wine.

For further information and download visit the WinShell Homepage.

The first candidate for TeXnicCenter 1.0 has been released as announced yesterday. It’s expected to be more stable than the beta release. Visit its download page to get it.

The today released version 1.8 brings the following changes:

• faster spell checker, based on a more recent hunspell version,
• inverse search will no more launch a new instance of Texmaker because now it can be started only once per user,
• brace matching again,
• improved autocompletion, \begin{…} completed with \end{…},
• improved error detection.

Texmaker is a free LaTeX IDE running under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and is published under the GPL 2.

For features, documentation and download visit the Texmaker homepage.

The TeXnicCenter homepage has got a new design, as Sven announced today in the LaTeX Community Forum. Now it has a more modern look and provides better access to its contents.

TeXnicCenter is an integrated development environment for LaTeX, running on the Windows platform. It’s supporting both MiKTeX and TeX Live. The version 2.0 is now under development as you can read in the news section.

Here’s an example illustration made with Jpgfdraw following a drawing in Singer/Thorpe Lecture Notes in Elementary Topology and Geometry, I made freehand it to illustrate homotopy of paths in my notes.

Screenshot:

Output in pdf format: homotopy.pdf
Jpgfdraw binary file: homotopy.jdr
exported tex file: homotopy.tex

LaTeX main document:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[landscape]{geometry}
\usepackage{amsmath,pgf}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\centering
\input{homotopy}
\end{document}

The vector graphics application for LaTeX users Jpgfdraw beta version 0.5b has been released today.

The author Nicola Talbot announced:

    Jpgfdraw is a graphics application written in Java. You can use Jpgfdraw to:

• Construct shapes using lines, moves and cubic Bezier segments;
• Edit shapes by changing the defining control points;
• Incorporate text and bitmap images (for annotation and background effects);
• Extract the parameters for TeX’s \parshape command and for \shapepar (defined in the shapepar package);
• Construct frames for use with the flowfram package;
• Pictures can be saved in Jpgfdraw’s native binary format (JDR) or native ascii format (AJR) or can be exported as:
  • a pgfpicture environment for use in LaTeX documents with the pgf package;
  • a LaTeX2e package based on the flowfram package;
  • an encapsulated postscript file;
  • a PNG image file;
  • an SVG image file;
• Incorporate text and bitmap images (for annotation and background effects);
• Alternative text may be specified for use when exporting to a LaTeX file (e.g. if the text contains symbols or if it should be set in maths mode);
• Mappings may be used to specify what LaTeX font declarations should be used when exporting to a LaTeX file.

That sounds very promising. I made a quick test today with Ubuntu Linux 8.04. After installing sun-java6-jre I downloaded and installed jpgfdraw-0.5b-us. It worked immediately. For the test I created a drawing and exported it into a pgf picture, tex format. After including it into a tex document and compiling I got the error Illegal unit of measure (pt inserted). It was caused by the numbers of the export file, they were using a comma instead of a decimal point. That problem is mentioned in the Jpgfdraw FAQ, but contrary to the FAQ it is still occuring with version 0.5b as I noticed using the locale de_DE.UTF-8.
After correction It worked perfectly, the drawing was displayed with high quality. Jpgfdraw could establish itself as a very useful tool.

Links:

• Homepage
• HTML manual
• Frequently asked questions
• Download
• TeX Catalogue entry
• on CTAN, directory