[OS X TeX] Emacs 22.92, %! and TeXShop

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Jan 26, 2007, at 9:02 PM, Thomas Kiffe wrote:

>> Isn't there a way to tell emacs to treat all files with extension  
>> "tex" as tex files too?
>>
>
> The issue here is that TeXshop's use of %! can make some of its  
> source files incompatible with at least
> emacs.

Actually for me this is not the issue. The issue, for me, is the  
inability of emacs to understand as a tex file something that is  
plainly and without any doubt a tex file. This is a file likely  
riddled with latex commands, and which has the "tex" extension.  
Surely this has been the format of tex files long before emacs even  
existed, if such a time ever existed. Simply because this file has a  
comment line with a particular format should not really cause emacs  
to automatically think of it s a postscript file, when nothing else  
about the file indicates that it is postscript.

 From the point of view of the user of the program (hence the "I" in  
this paragraph is the user), I have a tex file, and it is a valid tex  
file, and it should be opened as a tex file. I neither know nor care  
what the format specification of PS files is, and neither should I.

What I was trying to say in my post was exactly this simple fact  
that, given the extension of the file, emacs should not consider it  
automatically as a postscript file, in sort the heuristic it uses to  
determine what language the file is from is flawed.
My second point was that given the infinite extensibility of emacs it  
should be both doable and easy to tell it to treat all files with  
extension "tex" as tex files.

> This is not a new issue. Several years back TeXShop used %&, which  
> made TeXShop incompatible
> with tex itself. Fortunately TeXShop was changed to remove this  
> problem.
> The question now is which program should be modified. Emacs has  
> been in use a lot longer than TeXshop and
> it uses conventions established long ago for recognizing a  
> Postscript file. It is TeXShop which insists
> on doing things its own way and expecting everyone else to follow  
> its conventions. Why can't TeXShop
> use something like %x, where x is not ! or &. Surely some other  
> letter could be chosen that wouldn't
> introduce incompatibilities.

> Tom
>

Haris



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