[OS X TeX] applescripts for TeXShop and iTeXMac?

[Will Robertson]

On 28 Aug 2004, at 4:43 AM, Matthew Hills wrote:

> Any advice on writing scripts that will run on both TeXShop and 
> iTeXMac?
>
> While I can write a script that can run from both environments, there 
> is an unfortunate tendancy for the both applications to be opened when 
> the scripts are compiled (presumably to access the relevant 
> dictionaries?).

As of half and hour ago I thought it couldn't be done robustly. I'm 
still pretty sure of this, now. I originally trying distributing my 
column macros as dual-app scripts, but there are two problems:

1. If you call things directly with

tell application "TeXShop"
	...
end tell
tell application "iTeXMac"
	...
end tell

If a user doesn't have one of these programs installed, even if the 
code in question will never run for them, the script returns an error 
asking for the location of the missing application. People with only 
one of the two apps on both sides of the fence emailed me about this.

2. So, you'd think that you could fix this, as you suggested, with

texapp = "TeXShop"
tell application texapp
	...
end tell

But now Applescript can no longer find the applescript dictionaries of 
the individual apps. The following fails in Script Editor, for example:

set texapp to "iTeXMac"
tell application texapp
	activate
	insert "hello" in the text of the front document
end tell

However, it DOES work in iTeXMac!
For both apps, you want something like this:

set texapp to "iTeXMac"
set newtext to "hello"
tell application texapp
	activate
	if texapp = "iTeXMac" then
		insert newtext in the text of the front document
	else if texapp = "TeXShop" then
		set the content of the selection of the front document to newtext
	end if
end tell

HOWEVER, this does not work in TeXShop. Dammit! So close. If you can 
work anything else out, I'd love to hear it. If you can work out where 
the problem is in TeXShop, you could get Richard Koch to fix it in a 
subsequent release...that's beyond my level at this stage, 
unfortunately.

Best of luck,
Will Robertson

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