[OS X TeX] Spotlight importers

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Tue May 3 03:57:29 EDT 2005


Le 3 mai 05 à 04:04, Adam R. Maxwell a écrit :

> I wrote a couple of Spotlight importers that people may find  
> useful.  BibImporter (for BibTeX files), and DVIImporter (reads  
> text of DVI files).  In my testing, they work fine, but let me know  
> of any problems (crashes or memory leaks).  Source is available on  
> request; DVIImporter has dvi2tty from gwTeX bundled with it.
>
> The importers are available at <http://homepage.mac.com/amaxwell/>,  
> and can be installed in ~/Library/Spotlight or /Library/Spotlight.   
> You can force Spotlight to index your teTeX tree with `mdimport -f / 
> usr/local/teTeX` in Terminal, and the DVI importer should give you  
> access to the contents of the DVI documentation files from  
> Spotlight, while Apple's importers will index the others.
>
> If you read the bibdesk-users list and installed a previous version  
> of my BibImporter plugin, please reinstall from the above URL.

Seems very useful, and brings more general questions about SpotLight  
which I couldn't find addressed in either OS X help or at Apple's  
more technical page <http://developer.apple.com/macosx/spotlight.html>:

- Is there an interface anywhere in Tiger to define when the  
SpotLight database is built, and to know when it's being built? I  
seem to remember seeing a dialog, immediately after installing Tiger,  
telling the SpotLight database was built every 30 minutes, but I  
can't find now where this is defined. Also, very often since  
installing Tiger I hear the fans of my PowerBook spinning and  
spinning and spinning, with no apparent reason, but can't see  
anything happening in either Activity Monitor or with "top" in  
Terminal. I imagine this is caused by SpotLight rebuilding its database.

- Aren't hidden directories like /usr/local/teTeX searched  
automatically when building the SpotLight database?

- Given the files in this directory are generally owned by root  
(depending on whether or not you stuck to the default setting when  
installing the TeX i-Package), should mdimport be sudo'ed?

And getting OT, for those that might be interested:

- I just noticed this morning on MacNN that Wolfram Research has  
already released a SpotLight module for Mathematica notebooks <http:// 
library.wolfram.com/infocenter/Utilities/5614>. I just hope it works  
with Mathematica 4!

- There's also a SpotLight module for NeoOffice <http:// 
neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/index.php/NeoLight> (the Java-based OS X  
port of Openoffice.org), but it seems so early in its development and  
the instructions for installing it seem so complicated that I'll wait  
until it matures.

Bruno Voisin--------------------- Info ---------------------
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