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

[Maarten Sneep]

On Jan 27, 2007, at 03:02, Thomas Kiffe wrote:

> The issue here is that TeXshop's use of %! can make some of its  
> source files incompatible with at least
> emacs. 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.

Guess what? I think Richard choose %! in the hope that it was  
compatible with what was out there. Ooops, honest mistake. And yes,  
there are already _three_ methods for indicating the master file in  
TeXShop. That code must be quite horrible (and I support two of those  
in my BBEdit scripts).

That said, what does emacs use for
1) indication of the master tex file
1a) if the current file _is_ the master file?
1b) if the current file is _not_ the master file?
2) indication of the "engine" (latex, pdflatex, ...)
3) the character encoding

3 is not needed for my current BBEdit integration scripts, but would  
be nice to have (I may want to add a macro that syncs the encoding  
with the \usepackage[...]{inputenc} statement). Where are these  
indicators located in the file?

On Jan 27, 2007, at 11:15, Jerome Laurens wrote:
> The only portable solution is to use a project paradigm design as  
> iTeXMac2,
> TeXnicenter, AucTeX and many others do in different areas. This  
> should be a
> good thing to develop a common project architecture, but this is  
> not what some
> developers want. I dream of a TeX consortium similar to the web and  
> xml ones...

The TeX consortium is called TUG, but diversity is its motto.

However, you have write access for the mactextoolbox website. Come up  
with a description of the (limited) scope, an easy to understand, yet  
extensible file format, an API written in a portable language (python  
integrates well with C/Objective-C), and people will use it.

I will integrate it in the BBEdit script if you do this (that is a  
promise). However, there are a few issues that should be resolved:

1) If you open a TeX file in an editor (no project open yet), how can  
that editor figure out which project the file belongs to?
2) For single file project, do you need a project file?

The problem I have with this is that all the information needed to  
connect all files in contained in the master tex file, and meta  
information to connect children with the parents has been placed  
succesfully in the sources (see emacs above). So what information do  
you want in the project file?

If the answer to 1 is "you can't" and to 2 is "you need one", then I  
can predict with confidence that this will fail.

Regards,

Maarten

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