[OS X TeX] biblatex / TeXShop questions

[Scot Mcphee]

I've just started using (finally) biblatex instead of manually inserting my citations (I have been doing it manually for the past year because I am a Classics scholar and I have to deal with several different citation formats, often all at once e.g. ancient texts references, artefact references, modern secondary sources -- and the ancient texts have a different citation format on a per text basis). 

Anyway I've decided I better start using biblatex at least for the secondary sources in my PhD before I have accumulated too many chapters and have to spend weeks converting more manual citations. Luckily I can export my citation database into a bib file from the Mekentosj "Papers.app" academic papers database that I use (it is a seriously good tool and also I just found its citation insertion system works pretty OK with TeXShop so I recommend it).

I just spent most of the day reading the doco for bibtex, and biblatex and other related packages and I spent the evening twiddling with biblatex on a test file I exported out of my thesis. I have a question in four parts (well, four questions):

1.
In the TeXShop preferences, I have told it my "bibtex" command is "biber", as I am using the biber engine. Now to get a working biblio I have to Typeset -- Bibtex -- Typeset which is really tedious, even using the keyboard shortcuts. Is there a way just to have TexShop execute those steps in sequence? I see in the "Misc" tab of the preferences there is a section "Personal Script". Do I need to write a shell script and put it there? I've also seen people mention a thing called texmk, is that a makefile format for TeX, and do I use that instead? I use XeLaTeX. 

2.
I am using the style "authoryear-comp" as that is pretty close to the house style for my PhD. However one thing it does do that looks wrong to me is the citation is 'Author YYYY' but the bibliographical entry is 'Author, Firstname. (YYYY). ...'. I know our house style rules are on the lines that if the year is in brackets in the citations, it should be in the biblio, and vice-versa. How do I control that? Do I need to write a custom style?

3.
When I want to include a page number or page range in the citation, which for Humanities scholars is all the time, is really the only way to do this like this: 
\cite{Feldherr:1998ts}{: 9--11}

The format we have to use is "Author YYYY: pg", I've found I have to add the colon, and the space, to the second argument. Can I configure it to at least take:
\cite{Feldherr:1998ts}{9--11}
And have the citation style add the colon/space separator?

4.
Additionally to this, how would you recommend to handle a complex footnote citation as per the following example: 
\footnote{e.g. see Jaeger 1993: 350--352, 361--362; Kraus 1994; Edwards 1996: 6--7, 46, 84--85; Chaplin 2000}

Should I handle it with all separate \cite entries as in 
\footnote{e.g see \cite{Jaeger:1993xx}{: 350--352, 361--362}; \cite{Kraus:1994xx}; \cite{Edwards:1996xx}{6--7, 46, 84--85} ...}
Or is there a cleaner way to handle that type of circumstance in a single \cite?

Sorry this has turned into such an epic query.



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