[OS X TeX] lost message? Suggestions for TeXShop

Denis Chabot chabotd at globetrotter.net
Thu Jun 17 02:40:53 CEST 2004


Hi Herb,

Le 15-Jun-04, à 8:00 PM, TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List a écrit :

>
>> A second request would make all the shortcuts available in Macros, 
>> Tags
>> (and Refs) so much more useful (right now it is often faster to just
>> type them) if they were available as a contextual menu when one
>> right-clicks (or control clicks) at a certain position in the text.
>>
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here.
>

Well contextual menus (I think I got the term right) are menus that 
appear at the cursor's position when you do a control-click or a 
right-button click if you have a two-button mouse. If you are in the 
finder, you get options that relate to files and folders, plus more 
things if you have third-party software that adds stuff to contextual 
menus. The choices you have depend on what kind of window (and even 
part of window) the cursor is. Many program take advantage of this to 
make their own options available to the user in this way in addition to 
the main menu bar, task bars, buttons, etc. that they may already 
offer.

In TeXShop, beginners like me find who need to consult a manual to do 
the simplest thing find it useful that many of these codes are stored 
in the Macro's menu. And even if you know them by heart, some of these 
things are tedious to type (and I have not started writing commands 
yet!). But some of the benefits are lost because of the time it takes 
to go drop the menu and pick what you want. If you only had to 
right-click where you are typing to see these commands and pick one of 
them, they would be even more useful.

Especially if the Ref command I suggested is there and gives you a list 
of the tables and figures you have created so far, so you can refer to 
one!

Now on something that gave me trouble yesterday: bibliographic 
references. I naively thought that because the database I use exported 
to bibtex format, this meant my formats for various journals would be 
exported too. I know now it is not the case. I went on CRAN and did not 
find much in terms of .bst files for marine biology. Anybody on this 
list is working in this field and has some to share?

And anybody uses Bookends in conjunction with LaTeX? Or are most people 
using BibDesk? I need the ability to download files from online 
services, and Bookends has a lot of flexibility. I hope I can continue 
using it. Also, it keeps a list of complete and abbreviated journal 
names, so one can choose one or the other on the fly for a given format 
style. How do you guys do this? You keep two tables, one to equate the 
very short journal names with complete journal names, another to link 
short abbreviations to true journal abbreviations, and you paste the 
appropriate one on top of an existing .bst file?

Unfortunately I'll be back with Word for my next paper: the editor of 
the journal wrote this:

> I need a Word file or WordPerfect file in order to edit your 
> manuscript AFTER
> it has been approved for publication.  Pdf files are not easy to edit.
>
> So do send your manuscript as a pdf file for submission and review but 
> once
> it is approved for publication, I will need a Word (or WordPerfect)
> document.  We use PageMaker as typesetting software and the typesetter
> prefers Word documents for  conversion of symbols.

They don't want a raw LaTeX file either. At least it will be easier for 
my bibliography (with my present state of knowledge!)

Cheers,

Denis
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