[OS X TeX] Scripts/Macros R Useful!

[Mohinish Shukla]

Hi,
	just to add a note about something I found very useful: (its probably 
old hat for many, but Im a new user & it works in exciting ways! :")

-> The macro/scripting mode in TexShop is really great.. I've been 
putting together a bunch of .cls and .sty files which I'll use for my 
thesis in psycholinguistics, so it needed to have APA-style citations 
and references, but also both author and subject indices, plus the use 
of IPA fonts (tipa package) and also the ability to draw linguistic 
trees..
	For a bunch of reasons, I cannot process the whole thing in TexShop, 
but what I did, I wrote a shell script, and I added it to 'personal 
scripts' in preferences, and used the %&personallatex command at the 
document top..
- So now, all I do is hit the LaTeX button on TexShop, and it runs the 
script, does all the (multiple) latexing, bibtexing build both indexes, 
  and eventually converts to pdf (thru dvipdf)!!
- Of course the brilliant thing is that instead one can write 
applescript in TeXShop, which does some preprocessing (backups, send 
filenames around) and hopefully then it'll be even more generic..

The reason I bring this up is that many things that need the command 
line can simple be scripted/macroed in TeXShop, so once you do that, 
doing all the complicated stuff is done by just hitting a single 
button, leaving you to work in peace on the content as the LaTeX 
philosophy demands.. :)

Mohinish


On 26 Jul 2004, at 6:48 PM, Aditya Dushyant Trivedi wrote:

> <snip>
>
>> There are some tricks [sic] that rely on postscript
>> (pstricks, psfrag) and will never function as such with pdftex. Since
>> discovering metapost, I haven't found a need for those packages.
>
>> Maarten
>
> There is a package called pdftricks which attempts to give you the 
> same functionality as pstricks for pdf output. I am not sure if it 
> does everything that pstricks does. To use pdftricks you will have to 
> use the shell-escape flag and works on the fly on Unix/Linux 
> (including OS X). To make ot work on the fly it uses some shell 
> scripting. Windows users have some work to do.
>
> -Eddy
>
>
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>

--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>