[OS X TeX] Searching the PDF?

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jan 14, 2011, at 10:37 AM, Alan Munn wrote:

> On Jan 14, 2011, at 9:09 AM, Herbert Schulz wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> Right now I'm trying to add some information about input/file encoding since I've seen folks have problems with opening/saving source files with the wrong encoding. We'll see how that turns out.
>> 
> 
> 
> Not to open a can of worms (I feel this has been discussed before), but is there any reason why the default encoding in TeXShop is MacRoman instead of UTF-8?  Using UTF-8 makes switching between different platforms a lot easier, and also saves any grief for first-time XeLaTeX (and soon LuaLaTeX) users.
> 
> Alan

Howdy,

More than likely for historical reasons. I believe TeXtures used MacRoman by default so there are lots of documents around that have that encoding on the Mac.

On the other hand what is better? Many documents from PC's are in latin1 (IsoLatin) and, of course, a popular choice is UTF-8 Unicode at this time. Don;t think you can make a universal default that will make everyone happy. Finally, if you write in standard TeX (e.g., commands for accented characters, etc.) you only use the ASCII sub-set that appears in all of these encodings so it makes little difference then.

You best bet is to set the default to your favorite version and, even better as far as I'm concerned, use the

% !TEX encoding = xxxxx

line as a default in all of your documents so that it makes no difference what the default is set to.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)