[OS X TeX] altpdflatex - back compatibility please

[mark oilcan]

--- Frank STENGEL <fstengel at mac.com> wrote:

> 
> Le 11 oct. 05 à 18:44, Jung-Tsung Shen a écrit :
> 
> > Thanks for the info. on TCOBrowser. I did look at it before from
> the
> > suggestion on this mailing list. There's still differences: in
> MikTeX,
> > it's one step process. Imagine this: in your document, you put
> > \usepackage{geometry}, because either you copy/get some lines in
> your
> > document from the Internet/friends and you are instructed to
> include
> > this package. When you compile your document, a friendly windows
> pops
> > up and asks: "Howdy, you don't have the package `geometry'
> installed,
> > would you like me to do that for you?" After the permission is
> > granted, it goes ahead to get it, expand it, and installs it in
> fly,
> > and the compilation continues. A few seconds later, you see your
> > beautiful masterpiece in PDF.
> 
> This really interesting idea comes at a price: the makers of MiKTeX  
> had to modify the TeX executables. One cannot use the web2c sources  
> (the fancy name for the "official" *nix sources) to produce this  
> unless one heavily modifies them and takes them out of the main  
> development tree...
> 

Actually, you could do this by writing a script (in your scripting
language of choice) that parses the output of a latex (or pdflatex or
whatever) and looks for messages about missing sty files. If found, it
pops up a dialog with the suggested message with a button that could
launch something like TCObrowser. You would wrap this up in a separate
shell script (or in texshopese an "engine" I believe) which you call
instead of latex (or pdflatex or whatever). Kind of a hack, but it
could work, if someone wants to bother. Personally, it doesn't seem
overly useful to me....

Mark A


		
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