[Mac OS X TeX] Re: The role of TeXShop

[Bruno Voisin]

Le jeudi 17 janvier 2002, à 04:20 PM, Jerome Laurens a écrit :

> Joachim Kock wrote:
>>
>> By the way, let me comment on another set of keyboard equivalents in
>> TeXShop: those Cmd-shift-L and Cmd-shift-T.  First of all, I find 
>> these key
>> combinations too complicated for the most important command in the
>> programme: Typeset!  Second, there should be no need to have two 
>> different
>> combinations for commands which are essentially the same (Typeset), 
>> since
>> it is hard to imagine a document which could be compiled in both TeX 
>> and
>> LaTeX. I think it would be better design to have only one command 
>> (Typeset)
>> which then in accordance with the structure of the source file would 
>> call
>> the appropriate programme.  In other words, the choice between TeX and
>> LaTeX is not up to the user, but should be determined completely by the
>> context.
>
> You are right in a mathematical sense.
> But you are wrong in a human sense.
> TeXShop was designed essentially for beginners and had to be simple.
> Avoiding hidden actions make things more evident to beginners.
>
> BTW the context you mention is very difficult to guess. The user
> has always to tell the program what format to use, it can tell it once,
> or each time.
>
> See the TeXShop-beta i am working on.

You may think I'm Textures-obsessed (and probably you're right), but 
again I found Textures' interface very sensible: its Typeset menu 
provides both (i) a list of all the formats available, in which you just 
have to tick the format you want to use for a given .tex document, and 
(ii) the Typeset (= compile = TeX) command. In this way there is just 
one typesetting instruction (with shortcut Cmd-T) and an unambiguous 
specification of the format. Actually it's just the way command-line TeX 
works, with the general syntax: tex &format.fmt file.tex

By the way, that's one thing I miss in TeXShop: the possibility to 
compile and use custom formats.

Bruno Voisin


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