[OS X Emacs] Migration from TeXShop to Aquamacs Emacs

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 02.07.2008 um 22:54 schrieb kbmail:

> First, I have to say I'm a bit frightened... I'm a mac user! ;-)

When you're a Mac user you should not feel any fear. I'd start to do  
that as a Losedos user ...

> Seriously, I'm a bit affraid by changing the encoding of my files  
> since I already wrote some 250 pages of my thesis on TeXShop with  
> its default encoding (Western Mac OS Roman), with many packages (I  
> wrote a style 'kb-these_book.sty' including 26 packages), many  
> includes,

This all plays no role. LaTeX itself has to convert all to a form the  
TeX compiler can work on. You're using an input and a font encoding,  
do you?

> and Mac OS provides several "natural" features for mac-roman  
> encoded files, as previews of the text in finder windows...

They work the same for users who prefer a standard encoding, ISO  
Latin-1 or ISO Latin-9 (ISO 8859-1 or ISO 8859-15) or an UTF variant.

> I'm working on macintoshes (for more than a decade) and I work  
> alone on my source files: there's no compatibility problems with  
> other people/platforms...

Not today. Will you be able to tell this also in 2020?

>
> So I need you tell me the reasons why you seem to prefer that one  
> leave the mac-roman encoding while we're on Mac OS, and, if you  
> will, whether you think I should leave this encoding now that you  
> know more about my particular case (which is probably the case of  
> some other TS->AE switchers).

It's the future. From Emacs they're removing support for ten years  
old or older platforms. Classic and its Mac-Roman and other Mac- 
something encodings are dead – or did you see any updates in the last  
five or six years?

>
> Also: what's xelatex, and is it compatible with latex2e files? (I  
> read "%%% TeX-command-default: "XeLaTeX" in your first reply; I've  
> been using pdftex until now).

XeTeX is another "engine" to convert TeX, LaTeX, or ConTeXt source to  
PDF. To do this it uses the system's native fonts, for example  
Baskerville or Hoefler instead of Computer Modern. It also supports  
non-Latin scripts and right-to-left writing. 'texdoc fontspec' in  
*shell* should open an application that will show the main part of  
XeTeX documentation. See also: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/ 
page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=XeTeX&


Anyway, you can create a copy of your Mac-encoded LaTeX source files.  
Mac OS X offers the iconv command. Emacs has the manual-entry command  
to read the documentation of UNIX (and many other) commands.

	iconv -f MAC -t ISO-8859-15 <file name.tex>

should perform one form of conversion. If you want to convert all  
your copies at once you can invoke:

	apply -d 'iconv -f MAC -t ISO-8859-15' *.tex

--
Greetings

   Pete

Let's face it; we don't want a free market economy either.
		– James Farley, president, Coca-Cola Export Corp., 1959