[OS X TeX] Opening documentation with TeXShop

[Ross Moore]

Glad to have you back Richard.

Concerning suggested additions to TeXShop functionality...

> 
> - I would like to be able to define scripts LaTeX, BibTeX etc. one for any
> file (or sets of scripts which can be connected to a file). This could be
> done so much nicer than it is done in iTeXMac!
> 
> I'm using a script which is started from the Terminal at the moment (I'm
> using bibtopic, and have to call BibTeX somewhat like
> bibtex file1
> bibtex file2
> bibtex file2
> now.)

Yes, being able to construct and run scripts would be nice.
As well as calls to  bibtex  and  makeindex , you may want to put thumbnails
into the PDF, for which there are utilities such as  thumbpdf  and  pdfthumb,
whose use may need to be intertwined with the (La)TeX runs.

Also, with slideshows, you may want to call pp4 (PPower4) and related java
programs.  Being able to do this without switching interfaces would be cool.

 
> - TeXShop should not open a .pdf and a console window for any file opened,
> especially not more than one for files beloning to the same main document.
> For me it was fine if TeXShop did nothing except from opening the .tex file
> with options to open the connected files.

For me, TeXShop will not open .sty files and .bbl files, etc.
for editing of macros, or simply copying contents to add into another TeX job.
Why cannot TeXShop open any text-file, whatever the name ?

The action of opening also a .pdf should be automatic only for a limited
set of suffixes, and be controllable by the user in some way.
e.g.  .eps , .ps  (automatic convert to .pdf, as at present)
      .tex  (open .pdf if exists already, otherwise **ask** )
      .dtx  (same as .tex)
      .doc  (same as .tex, when *not* a binary Word document)
      .ins  (no .pdf; issue warning that typesetting will create new files)
      .sty, .bib, .cls, .ind, .toc, .def, .ldf, ...  (no .pdf)

With the .ins (and associated .dtx) it might be nice to have a panel
that displays which files will be unpacked from the archive.
Some parsing of the .ins should be able to determine this.

A bit harder would be to detect that there are user-editable options
within the .ins, such as commented lines that the user is allowed
to change to get extra files for particular platforms, or languages.


> In brief, it is "give us some of the options from iTeXMac, but let TeXShop
> stay as elegant and as fast as it is!". Please...
> 

The main thing that prevents serious use of TeXShop as a TeX development
environment is the lack of ability to interrupt a job mid-stream,
in particular during a \tracingall .
Here you need to be able to interrupt a job at any point, examine
the .log contents, and perhaps continue processing.
(Using a plain old terminal window is currently the best for doing this.)

Implementing this shouldn't be much harder than having a button on the Log window
that passes the <ctrl>-C keyboard action to the running job; the existing
interface then would allow the subsequent <return> to be typed for continuing.


There's my developer-oriented wishlist.


All the best,

	Ross Moore



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