[OS X TeX] TeXShop's %& ugly bug

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 10 sept. 04, à 12:07, Maarten Sneep a écrit :

> On 10 sep 2004, at 11:55, Will Robertson wrote:
>
>> On 10 Sep 2004, at 6:22 PM, Maarten Sneep wrote:
>>
>>> I'd like to add that there should be no real reason to reinvent the 
>>> wheel: emacs has added meta-data information to tex and other 
>>> file-types for years. The important ones (master-file and 
>>> character-encoding) are all there, and I think adding some 
>>> application specific ones would not be horribly hard.
>>
>> Do you know the specifics of how this is done? Is it simply comments 
>> at the top of the document, or instead a separate file with the 
>> information inside? It does seem sensible to coerce emacs' method.
>
> A set of comments at the end of the file, I'd have to look up a sample 
> somewhere to get at the specifics, but there are emacs users on this 
> list (and even the porter of Carbon enhanced emacs hangs around here), 
> and I think they can provide much more detailed answers of how emacs 
> does things.

While I disagree strongly with the tone of Jérôme's original message, I 
agree with him on one thing: the logical place where such information 
(format, encoding, etc.) would belong on Mac OS X would be inside a TeX 
wrapper, in the same way as it lived inside the resource fork of the 
TeX file on Mac OS Classic in Textures. It's a pity that the idea of 
wrappers has not arisen more interest from other TeX developers than 
Gerben and Jérôme.

Inside a wrapper there could also be the graphical files to be included 
in the TeX document, QuickTime movies, etc., and the auxiliary files 
created by (La)TeX. (But that would, probably, mean tools would have to 
added to the TeX front-ends, to manipulate these files, save the PDF 
output as a separate file, trash the aux files, import the graphics, 
etc.)

This is the way Keynote files (actually wrappers) are organized.

That could also be a place where to put ancillary files used by a main 
TeX document (.bib file, \include'd files), provided that would not 
conflict with a more clever project structure (not being a programmer, 
I don't use projects myself, and have no idea what kind of structures 
Xcode and iTeXMac use for this purpose).

A wrapper would also be the place where to put information such as the 
mognifications of the input and preview windows, the position of the 
content of these windows, the font used in the input window, etc. 
(again things that belonged to the resource fork of Mac OS Classic 
files). For example, I use TeXShop and set the magnification of the 
preview window generally to 200%; having a 17" screen, I put 
side-by-side the input window on the left and the preview window on the 
right; the preview window is too small to contain a full A4 page at 
200%, so that I move its content to put the margins of the page out of 
the window; because TeXShop sets the upper left corner of the page at 
the upper left corner of the window each time a preview window is 
opened, this means each time a TeX document is opened I have to move 
around the content inside the preview window first, which is a bit 
cumbersome; having these settings saved for each document would be more 
comfortable.

But, of course, all this would mean one step further from 
cross-platform compatibility, which is a concern.

FWIW,

Bruno Voisin
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