[OS X TeX] iOS apps

[Scot Mcphee]

-- 
http://inlustre.net/
http://crazymcphee.net/


On Wednesday, 5 September 2012 at 04:59 , Alain Schremmer wrote:

> 
> On Sep 4, 2012, at 8:58 AM, Scot Mcphee wrote:
> 
> > On Tuesday, 4 September 2012 at 20:43 , Alain Schremmer wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Sep 4, 2012, at 5:41 AM, Scot Mcphee wrote:
> > > 
> > > > It also will parse \include to show you all the files that are
> > > > included from the current one. So even if the bit of the PDF you
> > > > click on is in an included file it will jump to that file.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > So does TeXShop.
> > Yes but you have to specifically select "Sync" from the menu.
> > 
> 
> 
> I have no idea where and what "Sync" is. I click in the pdf of the 
> whole book and here comes the tex of the included.
> 
> 


Sync is on the context-menu. Apart of command-clicking, I don't see this feature of TeXShop. It does however, do it more accurately, Texpad only jumps and highlights the paragraph where as TeXShop will jump to selected characters so its a bit more accurate.

However the one thing that drives me crazy (sometimes) with TeXShop is the plethora of multiple windows open at the same time. Texpad has a very nice three-pane view. This is the thing with software; we've all got our "one thing" that he hate or love about any bit of software and for most of us, I think that one thing is core to our liking it. I'm sure if TeXShop dropped the multi-document window model then there'd be a whole bunch of people who'd get their knickers in a twist about it - software users are like that! (especially for some reason, some users of open source software). But I digress.
 
> There is of course another way to proceed: each included file has a
> dedicated root file and so does the whole book. Then, when I click in 
> the whole book pdf, not only the included tex file comes up but so 
> does the corresponding pdf.

Yes I can see that's very beneficial feature - that I will start to use - but it doesn't solve the windowing model.
 
> > Because Texpad sees the set of files as all-one-document (if, of 
> > course, you opened it from the top level document), you can 'sync' 
> > to a subsidiary file, fix the issue and press "Typeset" and it re- 
> > typesets the whole thing.
> > 
> 
> 
> I don't really see the point. I usually work on one chapter at a time 
> and that the included file has a dedicated root file makes getting its 
> pdf almost instantaneous. I compile the whole book only once in a 
> while, mostly towards the end.
> 
> 


We have graduate school fascists who insist on rejecting people's theses because they don't comply with some minor point of their low ideals for crappy document preparation. The only template they provide is in MS Word (seriously, an actual DOC, not even a DOT template). I went and searched the Mathematics and Physical Sciences school website to see if they had ever done a TeX style to match the Grad School's requirements, but, apparently not. If such a thing exists then they must just pass it informally about their postgrad student body (I am a Classics postgraduate, everyone else here uses Word (!) because that's what the Graduate School tells 'em to use). The only reason I knew TeX existed was because in a previous life I was a software engineer. Anyway I've been developing a document class based on memoir that matches my Grad School's requirements (the software engineer coming out to party I guess). 

So I've been working a bit with a "whole of thesis" view. When I am done (mostly already) I'll go back to working on individual chapters.
> > The editor is not as powerful though. It was worth the twenty buck 
> > spend though to have a good look at it. I'm still considering what 
> > exactly I will do for an editor ... bear in mind my main writing 
> > tool is still MMD format in Scrivener
> > 
> 
> 
> You will have to forgive me: I know neither what MMD format is nor 
> Scrivener. But I will look them up out of sheer curiosity.
> 
> 
> 
MMD is "multi markdown" it is a very simplistic markup that was originally developed as "Markdown" by John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame. This is just a way for non-techies to be able to write a document with headers, and bold and italic and links, and then turn it into HTML easily. You just do things like #heading# or *italics* or **bold** or [link]. Wordpress has a plugin that takes Markdown as one of its inputs for blog posts, for example. MultiMarkdown is an extension with more features and the ability to transform itself into several different output formats, LaTeX being one of them.

Scrivener is a writing tool that allows you to write in small chunks and easily rearrange them. It gives you the ability to break down your long texts into a rearrangeable hierarchy and view it in several ways, one of which is an index-card view that I find very useful. It is a document drafting tool, not a document preparation tool. Its actually used a lot by novelists and screenwriters (screenwriting is very serious about having a completely rigid format in Courier font, very weird). And also writers of academic theses. A popular way to use it is to eschew its internal formatting (which is by design pretty primitive anyway) and write in the MMD format. Then it can run its built in MMD tooling to export the results as LaTeX. Actually I wish it supported LaTeX properly, so I could just write in LaTeX directly, but not (well, I think I could force it to do it, but it would be clunky). I actually asked that question in a forum once and people answered "Why would you want to do that?", 
so I gave up asking about it there.

Also thinking and writing about this stuff is a great way to avoid the actual *thesis* writing process. ;-)


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