I never wrote Nisus macros before Express, but I'm finding it pretty easy. Sure, I have to learn Perl, but I'm already comfortable with sed and awk, so Perl is like throwing C and sh into the mix. Pretty easy I think...
Does anyone have experience working with TeX and NWE? If so, any useful scripts or macros to automate the workflow?...
Although I'm finding NWE in its current version too limited for my needs, I do have some experience with TeX, and with scripts and macros to automate its workflow. Your apparent familiarity with Unix might make the solution I'm going to outline attractive.
Typically, I work on a small number of plain-TeX files, with dozens or even hundreds of iterations to view the partially completed results. My own approach has been largely to use Apple's implementation of X11, Fink's Unix TeX packages, and Emacs as my text editor. To streamline the interaction between the Finder and X11, I keep an icon on the Dock of the folder containing the file I'm currently working on; once this folder is open, I've written an AppleScript to launch X11 and have Emacs open the selected file in that window (or the window's directory if no file is selected.)
When I'm ready to TeX my file and view the result, I invoke a shell script in Emacs of either form
pdftex myfile && open myfile.pdf
or
tex myfile && dvipdf myfile && open myfile.pdf
which command I can then repeat at will using Emacs's command history. For me at least, this approach seems to flow pretty smoothly.
I'm also exploring the use of IBM's ViaVoice to dictate TeX source files directly. This is involving principally the development of ViaVoice macros corresponding to TeX keywords, plus a Unix shell script utilizing sed and perl to extract and clean up the ViaVoice text from its document.
Here are a couple of less Unix-y ideas. At least one user on the Nisus list uses Alpha as a text editor for his TeX source files. I've looked at Alpha and it seems very nice, but I haven't seen any reason to switch from my usual approach, so I haven't investigated Alpha in much detail. Again, although I've almost no experience with BBEdit, it's supposed to be a very good text processor and I'm sure there are a lot of people on this list who could tell you about it. Lastly, the MPW programming environment, freely available from Apple but limited to the classic mode, contains an excellent text processor with a color-coded TeX mode (if I remember correctly) and full-fledged regular expression capabilities.
Best regards,
Jonathan
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