The TeXworks project is an effort to build a simple TeX front-end program (working environment) that will be available for all todays 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.