Best practice for displaying results of shell commands (LaTeX)

[Andrew J]

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....

[Maarten Sneep]

Hi,

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

[Prachi Gauriar]

Hey there,

It’s been 15 years since I did this, but my recollection I built a Makefile to do this.

BASE_NAME = MyLaTeXDoc
TEX_SOURCE = $(BASE_NAME).tex
BIBTEX_SOURCE = $(BASE_NAME).bib

RESOURCES =

INTERMEDIATE_FILES = $(BASE_NAME).aux $(BASE_NAME).log $(BASE_NAME).log $(BASE_NAME).bbl $(BASE_NAME).blg
PRODUCT = $(BASE_NAME).pdf
compile: $(TEX_SOURCE) $(RESOURCES) bibtexFile 
    pdflatex $(TEX_SOURCE)
    pdflatex $(TEX_SOURCE)

bibtexFile: $(BIBTEX_SOURCE) auxFile
    bibtex $(BASE_NAME)

auxFile: $(TEX_SOURCE)
    pdflatex $(TEX_SOURCE)

preview: $(PRODUCT)
    open $(PRODUCT)

.PHONY: clean
clean:
    rm -f $(INTERMEDIATE_FILES) $(PRODUCT)

Then I wrote several simple scripts that would run the different Make targets (Compile LaTeX, Preview LaTeX, etc.), which I would launch from the Scripts palette.

Like I said, it’s been ages since I did this, but it worked pretty well for me.

-Prachi