We are finishing up the next TeX Writer major update and hope to deliver it as soon as possible. We have many feature requests, but unfortunately many of them have to wait for another update, because we simply don't have enough time to implement everything in this release. We have to focus on the file syncing part, as we have explained before that TeX Writer's current dropbox syncing will stop working near the end of November.
New TeX Writer 4.0 supports two general purpose cloud storage: Dropbox and OneDrive. It will have full access to your cloud files. Instead of syncing everything down to your device, you can now select a single folder to sync. This will make syncing a lot faster. Although the syncing engine has been totally rewritten, our existing users should not find the changes surprising. Everything is still familiar and more explicit. Of course you will need to relink.
An unexpected outcome of this redesign is that now online XeLaTeX compiler is also supported. If the following fragment is detected in your tex file, TeX Writer will treat it as XeLaTeX file and try to compile it with our online compiler.
\usepackage{fontspec}You still compile a file as you have always been doing, everything is handled automatically, as long as the source files are kept in sync with a cloud folder. The cloud compiler doesn't keep a copy of all your files. It only downloads required files from the cloud. Downloaded files are purged after use. To have a quick turn around, files are cached for 1 hour before deletion. In order to use our compilation server, you must have a Pro subscription.
There are also a lot of small improvements to make TeX Writer easier to use. For example:
- Embedded webserver in addition to webdav server
- Disable the iOS 11 "Smart Punctuation" in our editor
- Online tips
- Recent edited TeX files
What's Next
There are a lot of things that we want to do in future TeX Writer updates. For example, a new editor. The current one was developed long ago and many users prefer iOS standard behaviors. People also want better integration with files app. And we want to make the pro subscription more worthwhile.
However, in the next few weeks, the Android version will be our new focus. Its file syncing is facing the same outage problem. The worst problem is that it relies on a package server which is outdated and unavailable. We really need to fix these issues as soon as possible.
UPDATE 11/16: TeX Writer 4 is now available in AppStore.