[texshop] feature request: show ASCII control chars

[Bruno Voisin]

> On 25 Feb 2023, at 23:17, G. M.-S. <lists.gms at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I have a feature request:  Sometimes I manage to enter an invisible "bad " char (ASCII 0–31 or 127).  Would it be possible to show them?  They could appear as ¿ for example.  Currently only newlines and tabs can be shown explicitly (and they are not "bad" in general).
> 
> I am aware that with Unicode the possibilities would be endless, that is why I am only asking about ASCII non printing chars.

Hi Guillermo,

This does not really answer your request, but in case you're looking for an immediate solution to your problem, what I generally use involves a separate text editor called BBedit.

Indeed, at times when pasting text copied from a web browser (for example to add a reference in a BibTeX file), non-printing characters are included which mess up the TeX output.

BBEdit has a convenient "Zap Gremlins" functionality, which may be used to delete non-printing characters or replace them with a given character (like say •) thus showing where they are.

I imagine other dedicated text editors (Emacs, Vim, Alpha, Smultron, Sublime Text, TextMate, VS Code, ...) have similar functionality. I'm just mentioning BBEdit because I've been using it since the Mac was at System 7!

Bruno