[OS X TeX] TeXShop's %& ugly bug

[Maarten Sneep]

On 10 sep 2004, at 12:43, Will Robertson wrote:
> On 10 Sep 2004, at 7:37 PM, Maarten Sneep wrote:
>> On 10 sep 2004, at 11:55, Will Robertson wrote:
>>> On 10 Sep 2004, at 6:22 PM, Maarten Sneep wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'd like to add that there should be no real reason to reinvent the 
>>>> wheel: emacs has added meta-data information to tex and other 
>>>> file-types for years. The important ones (master-file and 
>>>> character-encoding) are all there, and I think adding some 
>>>> application specific ones would not be horribly hard.
>>>
>>> Do you know the specifics of how this is done? Is it simply comments 
>>> at the top of the document, or instead a separate file with the 
>>> information inside? It does seem sensible to coerce emacs' method.
>>
>> A set of comments at the end of the file, I'd have to look up a 
>> sample somewhere to get at the specifics, but there are emacs users 
>> on this list (and even the porter of Carbon enhanced emacs hangs 
>> around here), and I think they can provide much more detailed answers 
>> of how emacs does things.
>
> From the AUCTeX documentation (v11.50, which I haven't even worked out 
> how to install yet), it looks something like this at the end of a 
> file: (couldn't find an example for the character encoding)
>
> %%% Local Variables:
> %%% TeX-master: "master"
> %%% TeX-command-default: "SliTeX"
> %%% End:
>
> It's ugly enough that I'd be happy just re-implementing the %& 
> functionality to use a different prefix. I find the whole issue fairly 
> trivial, though.

Trivial: maybe, ugly: OK, but let's at least agree on a working 
standard: emacs has been out there far longer than _any_ of the Mac OS 
X solutions, so I propose to use that one. To me it seems that you can 
just add local variables to the list, and emacs would still use it. The 
tricky bit is that the information is near the end of the file, making 
is a bit harder (character encoding information is easier to use when 
it is placed near the start of the file, especially since there is no 
guarantee that the information is right _at_ the end of the file).

>>> This release of TeXShop seems more difficult than previous ones...
>>
>> Yup. I've switched to BBEdit and my own macros a long time ago... 
>> Once the specifics of the emacs solution are posted I'll attempt to 
>> integrate them with my scripts and publish those.
>
> It occurs to me that tasks like these have probably been undertaken 
> many many times in the last 20 years...

Oh, sure: talk about reinventing the wheel...

Maarten

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