[OS X TeX] bbedit and xelatex

[Scot Mcphee]

> 
> I see no extra blank line but simply a single new line rather than two in a row. I wonder if TextEdit does some strange things to shorten the file. Get a copy of TextWrangler from <http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/> which is free. I've used the ``fancy'' version, called BBEdit, since pre-OS X days and they make a great editor.


Hi Herb,

I use bbedit as a general editor and I've been meaning to install the plugins to make it automatically compile latex into PDFs. I currently use xelatexmk in TexShop. Is there a good online resource that explains how to get that configuration running in BBedit? I've tried Googling and never found a satisfactory resource that seems to explain clearly how to do this. I've installed the CompileTex 'plugin' for BBedit and had a look at the CompileTeX-engine shell script that comes with that and apart from a few options at the top the thing looks supremely confusing: most of seems to be a gigantic case statement, the switch of which appears to be the first argument to the script. Shell scripts don't particularly confuse me, I've written whole systems in nothing but /bin/ksh and some C and perl. I'm not at all sure as to how in that file to make it work with xelatex -- on the command line I can just use "latexmk -xelatex -verbose" and it usually turns out ok.

I much prefer BBedit as an editor to the one in TexShop: I find it a lot more "editorly" in the way I'm used to. Recently I've started doing my Aeneid translation in plain text just so I can use BBedit: then using search and replace to insert all the LaTeX control sequences and copying and pasting the result into a TexShop document!

regards
scot