[OS X TeX] Carbon Emacs for TeX

[Peter Dyballa]

Hello!

I am somehow relaxing from writing what could become a TUGboat article 
on the MacTeX install package and was playing a bit with "GNU Emacs 
22.0.50.1 (powerpc-apple-darwin7.9.0)\n of 2005-12-21 on 
rodrigues.inf.ed.ac.uk - Aquamacs Distribution 0.9.8" -- aka Aquamacs 
Emacs 0.9.8.

I think it's ripe to be used as a TeX and XɘTeX editor (although there 
is no automatic XɘTeX/XɘLaTeX item in AUCTeX Command menu yet), even 
using the Unicode math characters. I checked its capability to 
correctly display the glyphs with utf8.txt from the Kermit 
distribution, up to the Control Pictures at U+2400, and from the end at 
U+FFFF backwards. It looked much better than in any other Carbon Emacs 
(it even looked better than in the HELLO buffer -- C-h H). It took much 
time to load missing fonts when crossing the borders between scripts, 
but I think once the used ones are loaded it can be fast.

No Emacs accepts input from Character Palette, but setting the variable 
read-quoted-char-radix to 16 (its usually set to 8 for octal input) you 
can input any character as C-q <Unicode position, taken from Character 
Palette> RET, if you have no other input method.

Aquamacs Emacs behaves in its ability to display glyphs from outside 
the proprietary Mac encodings much better then Emacs.app, which is GNU 
Emacs 23 (Unicode Emacs) with a NeXTSTEP/GNUstep/OPENSTEP shell around 
it, kind of an 'Aqua Emacs/Emacs on Aqua.' The latter cannot work with 
preview-latex, both are still a bit handicapped when it comes to 
printing text or graphics buffers. Aquamacs Emacs has some strange 
customs, opening for every buffer a new frame (tool window), setting 
the *scratch* buffer's mode from Lisp to text (good for writing text, 
bad when there are no means to prevent this nonsense, an additional 
buffer *scratch text* would be more appropriate), wanting to save the 
*Message* buffer when quitting for whatever reason, and loading 
recursively all Elisp files it finds at too many different places in 
the file system). I hope its version 1.0 comes with a button to switch 
between 'aquamatic' and sane Emacs behaviour ... it has so many special 
settings, most documented in a Changes document, a PDF manual, and in 
Apple Help (and in Emacs Wiki), that *some* reading is necessary. Or 
two blocks of recommended Elisp code for .emacs, to use either Aquamacs 
or GNU features.

http://aquamacs.org/
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/AquamacsEmacs/
(http://emacs-app.sourceforge.net/)

--
Greetings

   Pete

  Increase the size of your bike by at least *five* inches
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