Synchronising location in md file with preview?

[Rainer Krug]

Hi

until recently, I used Atom which has a great feature: it synchronises the location of the cursor in the md file with the location shown in the preview of the md file.

Is this also possible in BBEdit?

Thanks,

Rainer

PS: I moved towards BBEdit, because the startup of Atom was taking ages, because I always added new plugins, which I used once a month... In other words, I was fiddling with it in the same way I did with Emacs before that.

[Steve deRosier]

Personally, I prefer using Marked 2 as my previewer. It can handle a wider variety of MD dialects. And while it can't synchronize the cursor, it does annotate the changed spot every time you save.

If you want to send in a feature request, the support email is at the bottom of this email.

- Steve

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[Christopher Finazzo]

I realize this is a pipe dream, but I would love to see something akin to Marked's ability to have a custom script handle the output and styling. In my case, I might run something like the following: 

% pdflatex $<

This produces a PDF from the filename and BBEdit's Preview could update to show the output. Currently, this requires a separate Terminal window to run the Makefile and Preview.app with the PDF open at the same time.

To that end, can a Unix worksheet do the same thing?

On Thursday, January 16, 2020 at 10:48:48 AM UTC-5, Steve wrote:

Personally, I prefer using Marked 2 as my previewer. It can handle a wider variety of MD dialects. And while it can't synchronize the cursor, it does annotate the changed spot every time you save.

If you want to send in a feature request, the support email is at the bottom of this email.

- Steve

On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 4:10 AM Rainer Krug <r.m....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi

until recently, I used Atom which has a great feature: it synchronises the location of the cursor in the md file with the location shown in the preview of the md file.

Is this also possible in BBEdit?

Thanks,

Rainer

PS: I moved towards BBEdit, because the startup of Atom was taking ages, because I always added new plugins, which I used once a month... In other words, I was fiddling with it in the same way I did with Emacs before that.

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[Sam Hathaway]

Check out Preview Filters. See “Applying Preview Filters” in Chapter
11 of the manual.

Hope this helps.
-sam

[Christopher Finazzo]

Oh. So. Close.

I can write a shell script that contains this line and make it execute but locating the pdftex executable in a way that TeX expects does not work. The preview window displays the console output of trying to run this against my input file.

#!/Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex

pdflatex

[Patrick Woolsey]

On 1/21/20 at 3:32 PM, chris....@gmail.com (Christopher

Finazzo) wrote:

>Oh. So. Close.
>
>I can write a shell script that contains this line and make it
>execute but locating the pdftex executable in a way that TeX
>expects does not work. The preview window displays the console
>output of trying to run this against my input file.
>
>#!/Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex
>
>pdflatex

I regret it's hard for me to usefully comment here since I'm not
familiar with your specific workflow; however, here's what
BBEdit expects from a preview filter. Cribbing from page 260 of
the current manual:

Creating and Using Preview Filters

Preview filters may consist of any of these three types:

* An AppleScript, with an entry point named "FilterTextForBBEditPreview".
This entry point will receive a 'unicode text' object which
is the
document's contents. If there is no
"FilterTextForBBEditPreview" entry
point, the script's run handler will be called with the
text. The script
should return a 'unicode text' result.

* A Unix executable or a symlink to any such item. (For
example, a copy
of the 'multimarkdown' binary.)

* A Unix script; for example, a Perl, Python, Ruby, or shell script.
(Any such script should contain a [ valid :-) ] shebang line.)

Both Unix scripts and Unix executables will receive the document's
contents as UTF-8 text on STDIN and should **return UTF-8 text
(ordinarily, in the form of an HTML document) to STDOUT**.
BBEdit will
then display that output in the Preview window.

so though you could also have your preview filter generate a PDF
and open that in Preview.app, these actions would necessarily be
external to BBEdit.

[PS: In place of your above, I would try a normal shell shebang
line and specify the full path to the desired binary in your
script, e.g.
====
#!/bin/sh
/Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex
====
and if that doesn't help, then please drop a note to support
with more details and we'll be happy to take a look.]

[Sam Hathaway]

In addition to what Patrick mentioned, I’ll add: I don’t think pdflatex is happy writing its output to stdout, or reading from stdin. You might have to write your latex code to a temporary file, call pdflatex, and then open the output file that pdflatex created and send that to stdout.

A simple script to do this would be:

#!/bin/sh

cat > tmp.latex # safe stdin (from bbedit) to a file
pdflatex tmp.latex >/dev/null # throw away pdflatex’s stdout
cat tmp.pdf # send generated pdf file to stdout (back to bbedit)

But the bigger problem is: I don’t think BBEdit can accept PDF data from a preview filter. It wants HTML. It might be possible to embed the PDF output in HTML, but I don’t know how to do that.

Personally I’d just use Skim to view the PDF output. It has an auto-reload function.

Hope this helps.
-sam

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[Maarten Sneep]

Hi,

On 2020-01-22, at 21:33, Sam Hathaway <list....@munkynet.org> wrote:

But the bigger problem is: I don’t think BBEdit can accept PDF data from a preview filter. It wants HTML. It might be possible to embed the PDF output in HTML, but I don’t know how to do that.

Personally I’d just use Skim to view the PDF output. It has an auto-reload function.

Not only that, it also is pretty easy to set up synchronisation of the cursor with your position in the preview, and the reverse: to go from preview to source.

You may want to try these scripts: https://msneep.home.xs4all.nl/latex/

Kind regards,

Maarten

[Christopher Finazzo]

Still no luck.

As I mentioned before, the Makefile is darn close to UNIX 101: A default rule which calls pdtlatex on the input file via redirection. I realize my request is closer to something that Preview.app should handle, but short of filing a bug w/ Apple - which has even less chance of being seen - this is the next best outlet. Furthermore, I suspect that Sam is correct in his assertion about BBEdit's preview not understanding TeX input, even if it is contained in a shell script.

Maarten,

I think I remember coming across your scripts in the past but was unsure if they still worked on more modern versions of BBEdit, I'll give it a shot and see how things go.

[Sam Hathaway]

Christopher,

Can you remind me exactly what you’re trying to do?

Is your goal to open a LaTeX file in BBEdit and select “Preview in BBEdit” to see the PDF document generated by pdflatex?

Thanks.
-sam

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[Rich Siegel]

On 1/21/20 at 3:32 PM, chris....@gmail.com (Christopher
Finazzo) wrote:

>I can write a shell script that contains this line and make it
>execute but locating the pdftex executable in a way that TeX
>expects does not work. The preview window displays the console
>output of trying to run this against my input file.

Pandoc <https://pandoc.org> can generate HTML from LaTeX, so a
filter with the correct invocation of `pandoc` may work.

R.
--
Rich Siegel Bare Bones Software, Inc.
<sie...@barebones.com> <http://www.barebones.com/>

Someday I'll look back on all this and laugh... until they
sedate me.

[Christopher Finazzo]

That's the idea.

Per Rich's suggestion, I've tried sending this through Pandoc and it's definitely closer. My source file has a bunch of hand tweaked stuff in it, so I still need to figure out how to handle a number of special cases.

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