[OS X TeX] TeXShop suggestions/questions

[Richard Seguin]

Nicola,

I could have written your comments myself! 90% of my errors have to do 
with missing $ characters. I just opened up a document with BBEdit, 
which colors the entire $ ... $ string green, and I have many 
paragraphs that are more green than black. It's almost as difficult to 
read as if there were no coloring at all. On the other hand, when there 
is a missing $, coloring the whole math mode string green is the best 
diagnostic tool. Therefore, I very much like the idea of something like 
a toolbar button that toggles solid green on and off.

As for your last suggestion, JEdit does this. Specifically, I have it 
set up so that the the $ ... $ string is colored green except for math 
commands, which are colored blue, and the ( ) { } ^ + - = characters 
which are colored red. It would be nice to have this kind of 
flexibility in TeXShop.

One additional suggestion: the ability to apply a color like very light 
grey to the entire text background so that it's easier on my eyes. This 
is a feature that most text editors have.

I've also recently noticed a bug. When I click on the oval button in 
the title bar, the toolbar disappears as it should, but then the bottom 
of the text window moves up, yielding no net increase in text area. I 
believe the bottom of the window is supposed to remain stationary, thus 
increasing the text window size.

Richard Séguin

On Thursday, November 21, 2002, at 02:28  PM, Nicola Cabibbo wrote:

> I would like to enter, even if lately, the $ coloring discussion.
>
> Coloring of inter-$ material can be very valuable
> when errors happen. Missing $ are for me the most frequent and
> annoying sources of errors. They are annoying because I frequently
> write paragraphs where math and normal text are frequently
> alternated, and a missing $ may cause an error
> at a location which can be quite a few lines removed from the
> location of the missing $ itself.
>
> On the other hand I really like the appearence of the TexShop
> page as it is now, as it is very clean, and favours an undivided
> attention to the content of the text.
>
> I would thus like to be able to activate inter-$ coloring with a
> switch-like device, perhaps a button, perhaps a keyboard action which
> I would only use when an error arises. I other words one would have
> two modes and the ability to alternate between them. This would be
> more convenient than a preference setting.
>
> An elegant solution would be to enable this colouring authomatically
> with the "Go To Error" button of the console.
>
> As a final suggestion, would it be possible to apply a special color
> to inter-$ material, but still give the standard color to math commands
> like \frac, etc?
>
>    with many thanks for this beautiful and clean application!
>
> 	Nicola Cabibbo


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