[OS X TeX] TeXShop 2.34

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jun 4, 2010, at 10:19 PM, Adam M. Goldstein wrote:

> ...
> If I understand correctly, it looks like TeXShop will be set up to use Lua... as the default, which I take to indicate a high degree of confidence that the changes will be for the better and that users  who don't pay attention to such things won't notice much, if anything. That's the suggestion below, I think.
> 

Howdy,

No, the default for TeXShop is still the built-in pdflatex engine as set in TeXShop->Preferences->Engine. All it means is that for new users of TeXShop the LuaLaTeX (and LuaTeX?) engine will be active (i.e., placed in the ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/ folder rather than just the~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/Inactive/LuaTeX/ folder) so you can see and use it right away. This is true only for new users; TeXShop will not change anything in the top level of the Engines folder if it already exists---that must be done manually.

> Also, is there really LuaLaTeX and LuaTeX? I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or if the situation is parallel with pdfTeX and pdfLaTeX.
> 

Yes, just as there is tex and latex and pdftex and pdflatex which just use different macro packages.

> Of course, the whole issue of the differences betwen LaTeX and TeX as well as the other flavors can be confusing.
> 
> The other issue to me is, are there any new security issues here? If the TeX/LaTeX processors can execute scripts (is this the right way to think of it), is it just a matter of time before we see macros like
> 
> \posttofacebook[everyone]{everything}
> 
> or better yet
> 
> \luascript{hahaha}
> 
> and we see that hahaha is a script the main part of which is
> 
> cd ~
> rm -rf *
> 
> Personally, I will probably adopt LuaTeX first thing, even before it's ready, and spend hours that could have been used for writing trying to get it to work just so!

As far as I know the Lua engine is highly restricted in its ability to nasty things. It has been embedded in many applications.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)