Hi, > On 22 Jan 2023, at 23:18, Andrew J <[email protected]> wrote: > > Dear all, > > I have been using BBEdit on and off for many years, but I've never been > satisfied with its use with LaTeX projects. Many other editing environments > (emacs, TextMate, VS Code) have well-supported packages for editing tex files > as well as running various latex engines and dealing with the output. > > I understand that BBEdit does not want to be an IDE, but this use case seems > pretty straightforward. Indeed, there have been various attempts through the > years at making an environment like this through BBEdit's scripting > capabilities. > > I note that many such attempts, including this fairly recent one, use a > separate terminal process to actually run the latex compiler. Is this > considered best practice? It seems to ignore things that BBEdit can do which > give ideas for other options: > • > capture stdout as the result of the do shell script AppleScript and display > in a new untitled window. This is actually straightforward, although I wish I > could figure out how to deal with naming windows and possibly not requiring > them to be saved. > • populate a shell worksheet and run it automatically. I can't quite > figure this out -- I've seem some pointers to actually getting the text into > a worksheet, but I can't work out running a shell command in a shell > worksheet from AppleScript. > So: are either of these considered the standard method for this sort of thing > -- and is there a standard method, or do most people just keep a terminal > window open and do everything by hand? > > Any other ideas? Obviously even more advanced stuff like parsing error > output, etc. (which is possible in most of the aforementioned IDE-like > editors) would be a bonus. I'd really like to move more of my work over to > BBEdit....
I wrote a solution some 20 years ago in AppleScript, using the terminal to do the heavy lifting. This saves you from a ton of configuration issues, as most instructions to get LaTeX working focus on the terminal. In fact most of the scripting is in a shell script that gets called from AppleScript (I strongly dislike AppleScript, it seems that I never get it to behave exactly as I’d like to have it. I would not advise to use a worksheet. It will save the output of the latex run, and that is certainly now what you want. Also the behaviour is not exactly what you want when you encounter tex errors. The interaction with terminal windows is in my experience less cumbersome than avoiding the terminal. A variant of the title of a Stanley Kubric movie suddenly floats to the top of my head: "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Terminal". My tooling is still available on https://msneep.home.xs4all.nl/latex/ I can no longer update it as my ISP made some changes to the overall setup, so if updates are required someone else will have to take over the maintenance. From the title you can figure out how old it is, TextWrangler is absorbed into BBEdit, so a lot of the text no longer applies. The BBEdit version of all scripts still work fine though. Feel free to use this as a starting point. Kind regards, Maarten Sneep -- This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature request or need technical support, please email "[email protected]" rather than posting here. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/bbedit> --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BBEdit Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bbedit/279A5D4F-D1D4-4D9E-A6A3-F64582126298%40xs4all.nl.
