[OS X TeX] Re: ifthenelse in or for engines

[Bill Rowe]

On 2/26/07 at 9:17 AM, herbs at wideopenwest.com (Herbert Schulz) wrote:

>First, as Peter Dybala said, that can't be done in either an engine
>file or the source. The best thing is to write a single engine that
>does the searching (using grep?) and executes the correct commands
>depending upon the search results.

This response seems contradictory to me perhaps because I may 
have a faulty understanding of "engine" or there are some 
details missing.

I had though an "engine" file was simply a script that invoked a 
specific TeX binary. For example, one of the files I have in the 
in the Engines folder contains the following

#!/bin/tcsh

set path= ($path 
/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current /usr/local/bin)
xelatex  "$1"

It seems like it should not be difficult to implement if then 
else clauses to invoke different binaries here based on whatever 
criteria was of interest to an user.

What am I missing?

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