Re: So what is the point of darwinports then?

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[..]
Well, I have to say thanks for pointing that out, I had installed it,
and wasn't aware that it worked that way. Might have to look into that.

Mind you, my use of LaTeX has just taken a downturn. I recently produced
an AGM report booklet for my sister's church, and made a couple of
monumental ***-ups, neother of which would have happened if I was using
Pages.

I copied and pasted all the report articles into TeXShop, added the
sections, title page, and text formating as necessary. However, I forgot
I had to edit *all* the bloody quotes and apostrophes, as some had be
sent as 'smart' quotes. I printed a document with almost *no*
apostrophes at all - along with a few missing intraword dashes.

I'm not sure what you mean by `some had to be sent as `smart' quotes'.
No such concept in TeX.

That should hav been 'some had been sent'.

But: I think I've met that problem. One of the downsides of OS X is
that I've yet to find a tool to let me do that sort of search+replace
job as easily as with the pre OS X tool I have. Automated search and
replace - that's the standard way to deal with that sort of thing (if
it's what I think).

I have a couple of Services modules that can convert to straight quotes,
I just missed it - trouble is, they appear almost the same on screen in
some fonts.

If the trouble is what I think, you need some kind of pre-processing via
a search and replace thingy. I wrote my own some years ago. I need to
learn how to use sed or Perl or something so I can move to an OS X
native tool, but you know what? The pre OS X tool I use was really well
documented... There's probably Perl stuff on CTAN to do the job that's
needful in this case, mind.

I tend to use TeXShop for my editing and Typesetting, I'm quite
surprised that it doesn't pick up on the incorrect quotes.

If you've got a file with pukka (non-ASCII) quote marks in it and
they're correct, it'll work via TeX if you put this in your preamble:
\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}

Ah, excellent, thanks.

If you've got a file with normal `unsexed' ASCII quote marks in it, TeX
won't play automagical games to sort 'em out - was the problem?

Not sure, I received articles from about a dozen people, all, mostly
using different methods of inputing the text. Some use Word - again
different versions, some I think use the Windows version of TextEdit,
and quite a lot gets typed straight into the email app, with formatting.

I'm trying to get them to at least save everything as plain text, but I
don't think they understand the difference.

As far as the dashes go, if you've got correct dashes,
\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc} sorts TeX out to know what to do with
'em.

I gather that there's no need to use that package if you're using XeTeX.

Whatever is installed with MacTex (yes, I rechecked, and that's what I
installed).

And automated search and replace is how to deal with any remaining
issues.

TeXShop can do search/replace, not sure about automation, but I can do
it manually easily enough.

I also forgot I was printing an A5 booklet, so the standard output got
reduced again, and was rather small.

Erm? Eh? How do you mean? I don't get output reduced in size if I'm
printing an A5 booklet from a (La)TeX source. I can't think of any
reason why you would.

(Not that I've tried doing the job since I got OS X. I had a much
better documented (i.e., it had a manual) TeX installation back then. I
don't even know where to start looking for the info and tools to do it
now - well, aside from `ask on comp.text.tex')

Ah well, I'm using PDFLaTeX for final output, and of course it's *that*
which gets condensed.

--
Andy Hewitt
<http://web.mac.com/andrewhewitt1/>
.