[Mac OS X TeX] BBEdit plug-ins for teTeX

[Tom Kiffe]

I have created three BBEdit and BBEdit Lite plug-ins that allow you to issue commands from BBEdit to typeset a file with pdftex and preview it with Acrobat Reader. These plug-ins give BBEdit much of the functionality of TeXShop combined with a much more sophisticated editor.

The plug-ins work as follows. Open a tex document in BBEdit. After editing the file go to BBEdit's Tool Menu and select pdflatex if your document uses the latex format or pdftex if your document uses the plain format. The plug-in opens a Terminal window, changes directory to the directory containing your tex source file and issues the command to run either pdflatex or pdftex on your source file. When processing is finished and you have checked the Terminal output for possible errors, hit command-w to close the Terminal window and return to BBEdit. Now choose Reader from BBEdit's Tool Menu and the plug-in will launch Acrobat Reader 5.0 and have it display the pdf file just created.

These plug-ins require that you have installed teTeX so that it can be run from the Terminal application and not just from TeXShop. It takes several seconds for the plug-ins to launch the Terminal or Acrobat Reader so, once these programs are running, close windows rather than quit the programs during a typesetting session. If the programs are running the plug-ins work quite quickly.

These plug-ins are just prototypes of what is possible when you want to use
BBEdit as your TeX editor with teTeX . If there is sufficient interest in
pursuing this topic I can easily create plug-ins for calling dvips, ps2pdf, bibtex, makeindex, etc. I would gladly accept the assistance of anyone who would like to help me make BBEdit a viable alternative to TeXShop.

The plug-ins can be downloaded from http://www.kiffe.com/tex/programs/bbedit_plugins_for_teTeX.sit.bin (28 K). Put the plug-ins in BBEdit's Support:Plug-Ins folder.

--Tom

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