[OS X TeX] TeXShop's %& ugly bug

Jérôme Laurens jerome.laurens at u-bourgogne.fr
Fri Sep 10 14:09:40 CEST 2004


Le 10 sept. 04, à 12:56, Maarten Sneep a écrit :

> On 10 sep 2004, at 12:43, Will Robertson wrote:
>> On 10 Sep 2004, at 7:37 PM, Maarten Sneep wrote:
>>> On 10 sep 2004, at 11:55, Will Robertson wrote:
>>>> On 10 Sep 2004, at 6:22 PM, Maarten Sneep wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'd like to add that there should be no real reason to reinvent 
>>>>> the wheel: emacs has added meta-data information to tex and other 
>>>>> file-types for years. The important ones (master-file and 
>>>>> character-encoding) are all there, and I think adding some 
>>>>> application specific ones would not be horribly hard.
>>>>
>>>> Do you know the specifics of how this is done? Is it simply 
>>>> comments at the top of the document, or instead a separate file 
>>>> with the information inside? It does seem sensible to coerce emacs' 
>>>> method.
>>>
>>> A set of comments at the end of the file, I'd have to look up a 
>>> sample somewhere to get at the specifics, but there are emacs users 
>>> on this list (and even the porter of Carbon enhanced emacs hangs 
>>> around here), and I think they can provide much more detailed 
>>> answers of how emacs does things.
>>
>> From the AUCTeX documentation (v11.50, which I haven't even worked 
>> out how to install yet), it looks something like this at the end of a 
>> file: (couldn't find an example for the character encoding)
>>
>> %%% Local Variables:
>> %%% TeX-master: "master"
>> %%% TeX-command-default: "SliTeX"
>> %%% End:
>>
>> It's ugly enough that I'd be happy just re-implementing the %& 
>> functionality to use a different prefix. I find the whole issue 
>> fairly trivial, though.
>
> Trivial: maybe, ugly: OK, but let's at least agree on a working 
> standard: emacs has been out there far longer than _any_ of the Mac OS 
> X solutions, so I propose to use that one. To me it seems that you can 
> just add local variables to the list, and emacs would still use it. 
> The tricky bit is that the information is near the end of the file, 
> making is a bit harder (character encoding information is easier to 
> use when it is placed near the start of the file, especially since 
> there is no guarantee that the information is right _at_ the end of 
> the file).
>

Let's agree to disagree.
IMHO, this is not a good idea because you are just making the first 
step towards reproducing the %& bug.
All these Local Variables do have a meaning in emacs and auctex and you 
are suggesting to interfere with something private changing their 
meaning.
You will have to be sure that emacs will not be affected by the new 
comments and ensure forward compatibility.
A TeX wrapper would be a much much better alternative.

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