[OS X TeX] Engine for sketch

[Matthew Leingang]

Dear Richard,

Thanks for your response.

On Dec 7, 2007, at 1:26 PM, Richard Koch wrote:

> Matthew,
>
> TeXShop has a list of extensions which activate the Typeset button  
> so users don't try to typeset pdf files, jpg files, etc. Your  
> example shows that there needs to be a (hidden) preference to  
> extend this list. This should be an easy modification and I'll try  
> to make it tomorrow and make the new version of TeXShop available.

Wow, thanks!  I'm humbled to make a useful feature request.  Being  
able to write custom engines makes TeXShop more than just a TeX IDE.   
Suddenly you have a text editor with pluggable processor interface.

Here's another application:  For web pages, I don't write HTML  
because I get distracted by styling and balancing tags and all that.   
I write ReStructured Text [1] and run python scripts which transform  
it to well-formed XHTML with nice class settings so it's easy to  
write CSS for styling.

Currently, I use makefiles, edit in emacs, and run the makefiles  
within emacs to compile and view the result.  But half the time I hit  
command-T instead, because it's the same process: write text, then  
process.  If TeXShop could be configured by the user to "typeset" RST  
files, all you'd need is another engine instead of a makefile.

Or povray [2], a raytracer for 3D graphics....the list goes on!

> The last line of your engine asks TeXShop to open a file. That's  
> fine. Actually, if you apply an engine to a source file, TeXShop  
> will automatically look for a pdf file with the same name but  
> extension ".pdf" and open that. So if your script renames the  
> output pdf file appropriately, it will automatically open.

That's probably better.  My experience with using open on the command  
line is that if the file is already open by the application, but the  
file has changed since the original open, the original version is  
still shown.  At least, this is what I saw in Preview.  But I think  
they fixed that in new versions of Preview?

Anyway, thanks again.

--Matthew Leingang

[1] http://docutils.sourceforge.net
[2] http://www.povray.org/

--
Matthew Leingang
Preceptor in Mathematics
Harvard University

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~leingang/vCard.vcf