[OS X TeX] bbedit and xelatex

[Scot Mcphee]

On 17/Sep/2013, at 10:30 , Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:

> 
> On Sep 16, 2013, at 6:41 PM, Scot Mcphee <scot.mcphee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>> 
>>> 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
> 
> 
> Howdy,
> 
> It is possible to set up TeXShop so that you use an external editor and compile in TeXShop. There may be some BBEdit macros (others on the list are experts on using BBEdit) that work properly with TeXShop. that way you could still use the xelatexmk engine in TeXShop to do the compilation.

The "configure for external editor" option in the TexShop prefs seems to do nothing; there's nothing in the help documentation that illuminates that option which I could find. When I turn it on and open up a previously edited tex document only the PDF opens. Google turns up nothing either -- there is a non-detailed discussion on stack exchange but the answer points to a document that no longer exists; and some additional discussion where the external editor option is invoked by a commenter in relation to solving some other type of problem. 

There is a rather obtuse discussion of the external editor in the documentation starting page 27 here - http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/Documentation.pdf- but absolutely none of this details actual concrete steps that could be taken to make it function - it just seems to be a general discussion of the feature; and even though nearly every single word of this is intelligible to me (I once even programmed TCL) as a whole it make absolutely zero sense. Its audience is not an end-user. 

All in all simply making bbedit call the appropriate shell script to run "latexmk -xelatex" (i.e. just extensively modifying the one that CompileTex installed) seems a lot more promising to me at this point.

Thanks for the tip though. If anyone else can chime in with information to make all this work it would be highly appreciated.

scot