[OS X TeX] Voting on feature requests

[Ross Moore]

Hi Chris, Alain, and others

On 12/02/2008, at 8:40 AM, Chris Goedde wrote:

> On Feb 11, 2008, at 3:11 PM, Alain Schremmer wrote:
>
> Just a couple of comments.
>
>> F—A Typeset button that does NOT save at the same time
>
> I don't see how this would ever work, since TeXShop calls tex/latex/ 
> pdf..tex to do the dirty work, and these command-line programs  
> require files be written out to disk. So if you want the current  
> changes in the editor window to be tex'd, they have to be written  
> out to disk somewhere, hence the save-before-texing behavior. One  
> could imagine trying to fake this by writing the file to a tmp  
> directory, but this won't work except in the simplest cases.

His earlier posts give the impression that what Alain really wants here
is to read the last modification date of a file and have this displayed
as the \date .

This can be done using TeX's \write18 feature to run external commands.
The date can be obtained in a Terminal using:

   ls -l myfile.tex | colrm 1 37 | colrm 13

giving a string such as:   Feb 12 10:04

Put this into a file called "date" with:

   ls -l myfile.tex | colrm 1 37 | colrm 13 > date

Do this inside a TeX job using

   \immediate\write18{ls -l \jobname | colrm 1 37 | colrm 13 > date}


Now open the file "date" and read it, with:

\newread\datefile
\openin\datefile="date"
\read\datefile to \mydate
\closein\datefile


Now the macro  \mydate  should expand to the desired
date and time string, so   \date{\mydate}
puts it onto the titlepage of a LaTeX document.

Vary the numbers to capture more or less of the string from
  ls -l   or similar listing command.


>
>>
>> G—Let the bottom of the source window be standard, with a  
>> horizontal scroll bar
>
> I don't know what this means. For example, neither Mail.app nor  
> TextEdit.app have horizontal scroll bars, so it seems to me that  
> TeXShop's source window is perfectly standard in this regard. Do  
> you mean that the editor should allow soft wrapping to be turned off?

Soft-wrapping can be a real pain; especially when you have data
that needs to be carefully aligned in columns.
Most definitely there should be the option to turn it off,
and have a scroll bar if lines are wider than the current
window-width.

Indeed this option exists already:

    Source > Wrap Lines > None


>
> Chris


Hope this helps,

	Ross

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia  2109                            fax: +61 +2 9850 8114
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