[texworks] Early thoughts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 19 Sep 2008, at 12:24 AM, Karl Berry wrote:

>    Yeah, you'll never be able to get 100% of the cases but I *believe*
>    (at least) you'll be able to get a fair majority.
>
> Heuristically guessing the engine from regexps worries me a bit,  
> because
> I fear that users will be quite confused when the guess is wrong.

I envisage that this would simply set the initial default engine when  
the file is loaded; users can always override this by making a  
different choice in the toolbar. Figuring out whether/when to change  
it on-the-fly as the document is edited could be interesting... I do  
have some ideas about this, though.

> Can we have or is there also a supported way to unambiguously  
> specify the
> engine, e.g., a first line of
> %&latex
> or, for context,
> % engine=luatex language=uk

Yes, TW recognizes TeXShop's "magic" comments such as

%%!TEX TS-program = pdflatex

to select an engine.

I haven't really considered the various ConTeXt possibilities, mainly  
because I don't use it; but I'm happy to listen to suggestions from  
those who do.

JK