[OS X TeX] Synctex doesn't work with file names that have spaces. Is this fixable?

[juan tolosa]

Just to share my memories, I was a TeXtures user for many, many years. My memories are mostly pleasant ones. The three big issues I had were 

(i) the handling of figures. The \special command was not easily transferable to other platforms, say, when submitting articles with figures to journals;
    in the PC World, PCTeX accepted the \special command, but it had problems of its own when handling figure sizes (very rigid options);

(ii) the characters with zero width, such as "\not" and the "\neq" for not equal. This conflicted with some Epson printers, and it was never clear whose fault it was;

(iii) the final blow: the non-transferability of TeXtures to the Mac system X, from system 9. This made me look for other options. I first tried OzTeX, until I finally
stumbled into Mac Ox TeX, and this excellent support distribution list. It was like a miracle. 

All in all, I have fond memories of TeXtures. It served me well for more years than I care to remember.

          Juan

On May 10, 2013, at 2:23 PM, Vamos, Peter wrote:

> On 9 May 2013, at 20:08, mrl wrote:
> 
>> Because of the demise of Textures
> 
> Is Textures no more then? Is Barry Smith still around? Just tried Blue Sky Research website, it doesn't work. If it is indeed dead, someone should write an obituary.
> 
> I have many fond and not so fond memories of Textures. Started using it when it wasn't even called Textures and was marketed by the publisher Addison-Wesley.  Anyway, what is vaguely relevant here relates to
> 
>> This person has hundreds of files, that have spaces in their filenames.
> 
> Could this person be using plain TeX? Classic Mac OS always allowed spaces in file names, unlike Win of yore, or Unix, and so did Textures, but for Plain TeX only! 
> 
> This is in fact one of my not so fond memories. I was a very late convert to LaTeX. When I did move over to LaTeX I tried it first by converting one of my plain TeX files, still using Textures. It didn't work. Didn't typeset. I spent a very long and frustrating  time trying figure out why. Inspect code. Re-read the Textures manual. LaTeX by Lamport. Alas, this list didn't exist in those days. You could email or maybe phone  Blue Sky but I was  in the morning in Europe and they in Oregon. Eventually I figured out that my file name had a space in  it; maybe I did have an error message "no aux file", I can't remember. Once I deleted the space, LaTeX on Textures worked. I must have, eventually, guessed that at the core the (La)TeX used by Blue Sky was still C+ or something like that and LaTeX needed to write and then call the aux file and this mechanism was not made Mac friendly.
> 
> Very soon after this episode I abandoned Classic OS, Plain TeX and Textures for OS X, LaTeX and TexShop. May be later incarnations of Textures allowed spaces in file names even in LaTeX, I don't know. 
> 
> So what is in a filename? I was reminded of the above recently when opening one of my old (Plain TeX) Textures files in TexShop to find the Typeset button greyed out and the Program button showing ConTeXt. After chaging this to Plain TeX the Typeset button was still greyed out. No spaces in the file name but there was a dot '.'.  Classic OS could deal with such a file name, not OS X and TexShop. So the right question is: What should not be in a file name? Dick Koch wisely counsels against using spacers. I would add to this any character which is used in a path name in some system (Mac, Win, *nix) such as \  / . :  etc.
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
> PS To the OP: 
> 
>> This person has hundreds of files, that have spaces in their filenames.
> 
> There are a number of batch change file name utilities around, I would assume that some of these could be used to rename  the files e.g. replace spaces with an underscore _.----------- Please Consult the Following Before Posting -----------
> TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
> List Reminders and Etiquette: http://email.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
> List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/
> TeX on Mac OS X Website: http://mactex-wiki.tug.org/
> List Info: http://email.esm.psu.edu/mailman/listinfo/macosx-tex
>