[texworks] Early thoughts

[Jérome Laurens]

Le 21 sept. 08 à 16:19, Will Robertson a écrit :

> On 21/09/2008, at 5:54 PM, Jérome Laurens wrote:
>
>> But a concrete implementation of per document prefs requires some  
>> serious thoughts.
>
> I don't really think this is necessary.
> Users don't transition often enough between editors to warrant the  
> time spent to do this in a formal and rigourous manner.
>
>
> Just add more data to the preferences data file recording the state  
> of the font, the typesetting program, whatever. Just like you don't  
> expect iTeXMac to read the previous window state of a document  
> previously opened in TeXShop, there's no reason for the other per- 
> document prefs to be recorded in a public and transferrable format.  
> (In fact, so much the better to not litter the working directory  
> with yet more auxiliary files!)

Ok, I think I have understood your point.
You were talking of different sets of preferences depending on the  
kind of document?
This is typically how code editors work, where for example the syntax  
coloring is adapted to the kind of document.
This works well because document types are completely determined by  
the path extension.
Unfortunately, this is not the case in the TeX world: your solution  
won't even apply to .ltx or .dtx files due to the engine.

In fact, I was not thinking of different editors, my point was about  
different kind of documents inside TeXWorks:
standard articles, beamer presentations, pdf vs dvips route...
For them, you will have different engines, different window sizes.
If you store the engine for each document, there is no need to store  
it in the preferences,
so you can have a simpler UI.

If you also consider people working on different computers, they will  
feel comfortable to work on an USB key or drive far example.

Of course there is the %! TEX comment, the emacs comments...

regards