After a bit of a summer break, the next public prototype of Compositor for Windows is now available! 🎉
What’s New?
From a user’s perspective, Compositor for Windows 0.3 will still look very barebones and borderline unusable. And it is, it’s a prototype. But under the hood, this version now has all the important bits in place for…
Basic WYSIWYG Editing
The app still opens the bundled User Guide on launch, as was the case with milestone 0.2:
However, the pages of the document are no longer read-only – there’s now basic WYSIWYG editing capabilities!
This means you can place the caret by clicking somewhere in the document, insert text by typing on the keyboard, or deleting characters (or entire selections of text) by using the delete buttons on the keyboard.
Don’t expect too much at this point, though. Simple typing and deleting should work, copy & paste and other more complex editing interactions will not yet work. These will be added over time in the upcoming prototypes. Performance also needs to be improved.
Basic Mouse Interaction
The mouse interaction patterns are basically the same as in the Mac version of the app.
A single mouse click will position the caret:
A double-click will select the current word:
A triple-click will select the current line:
A quadruple-click will select the current paragraph:
Pressing esc will unfocus the page and hide the caret.
Basic Keyboard Navigation
This version also brings very basic keyboard navigation. Cursor ←/→ moves the caret
by one character, and ctrl + ←/→ moves the caret by one word.
Holding shift while
moving the caret will extend the selection by one character at a time. Holding both shift
and ctrl will extend the selection by one word at a time.
Most other keyboard shortcuts (like go up one line, jump to the beginning of a line, go to the previous page, etc) are still missing and will be added over time.
Basic Page Zoom
Three new app bar buttons let you zoom in and out on pages, or reset the zoom level:
Improvements in Installer & App Size
A lot of work has gone into improving the build system. The primary user-visible change coming out of this effort are significantly reduced installer and app binary sizes.
On ARM,
- the installer went from a 102 MB download to 55 MB, and
- the installed app went from 150 MB of disk space to 80 MB (about 60 MB of which are occupied by the minimal LaTeX distribution that comes bundled with the app).
Try it Out!
Prerequisites
For the time being, I am using a self-signed certificate to sign the app installers. If you want to install a prototype build, you will need to install my self-signed certificate (once) by following these steps:
- Download and double-click the certificate file: Compositor.cer
- Click “Install Certificate”
- Choose “Local Machine”
- Select “Place all certificates in the following store” → “Trusted People”
- Complete the wizard
The forthcoming “real” releases will of course be signed with a proper code-signing certificate, and these steps will not be necessary.
The Installer
Compositor for Windows is distributed as an MSIX installer to provide a modern installation experience:
- intel/AMD installer: Compositor-0.3-amd64.msix
- ARM installer: Compositor-0.3-arm64.msix
Note that the app is an AppContainer app (similar to “sandboxed” apps on the Mac), so it has limited accesss to the system unless explicitly granted by users.
Your Feedback is Much Appreciated!
If the installer doesn’t work for you, please let me know. If the app doesn’t launch or crashes, please let me know. If something doesn’t work, please let me know.
In general, any sort of feedback is much appreciated! You can reach me by email at support at compositorapp dot com.
Next Up
The next milestone 0.4 will extend WYSIWYG editing to arbitrary user documents. Also, this release will include the automatic package downloader and installer. So you should be able to play around with your own documents by then!
Along with that, expect incremental improvements to user experience and WYSIWYG editing.
Stay Informed
Follow @compositorapp on Mastodon or
or Bluesky for news and updates
about Compositor for Windows!