[OS X TeX] Customize brackets/braces/parens/delimiters TexShop matching

[Richard Koch]

> On Feb 12, 2018, at 5:09 AM, Juan Acevedo <juan.acevedo at gmx.net> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Dick for the jet-lagged answer. I was hoping you would step in, and no need to apologise.
> 
> I do understand the complications of intending to match " and < as delimiters, but this is not what I mean, as has been noticed now, because it is all in a UTF8 context.
> 
> What I mean is something already provided by default in TeXworks. I appreciate TeXworks, but TeXShop... frankly, I can hardly spend a day without using it (with constant gratitude too), and since this feature would not seem to be a hard thing to add...
> 
> The characters that would need to be recognised as delimiters are:
> 
> U+201C 	LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
> U+201D 	RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
> 
> U+00AB LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK (these are the guillemets)
> U+00BB RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
> 
> But in fact, to keep things simple, instead of adding a feature for everyone, would it be possible to just allow users to activate their language-specific delimiters, I mean like CJK corner brackets (U+300C and U+300D), or „German“ double quotes... Maybe a hidden preference, or a document in Library that can be edited?
> 
> Why all this?
> I'm no programmer. Sometimes, when importing OCR'd text or simply badly formatted documents into TeX, delimiter matching is of great help to prepare the pages for csquotes parsing through them. In my case this is a tool for "debugging" long documents in preparation for TeX typesetting.
> 
> Cheers,
> J
> 

Juan Acevedo,

Thanks for the happy response. I slept last night. Now that I understand the specific proposal, I'll
think about it and see what I can do. 

Just once I worked in industry for a year, with a crusty guy named Gene Welborn who knew that I
wasn't an engineer and had to learn fast. Gene and I would meet each morning to design the next
phase of our project, and end up arguing. So we'd both return to our desks and write up our point
of view. Gene insisted that these documents be nicely formatted, in excellent English. In the
process of writing this document, we began to understand the problems in our position,
and the problems in our opponent's position. So when we met in the afternoon, each of us
had a much better design. 

Each day --- the same process.

I found this so useful that I tried it with other collaborators, but unfortunately most just got angry.
When the Wellborn approach works, it is wonderful to behold!

Dick Koch