[texhax] What program can I use to edit TeX files?

[Daniel Greenhoe]

I use XeLaTeX under Windows and have been using Crimson editor(s) for
years. But I would like to change. I have been able to use Crimson to
typeset English and Chinese, but it does not seem to support full
UTF-8 encoding.

But I have some additional requirements not mentioned (?) in the
previous emails:
  1. I very often use column editing. I want to be able to switch in
and out of column mode using only the keyboard (no mouse).
  2. I usually have maybe 10 or more files open at a time. I want them
all accessible in a single tabbed window. I want to be able to switch
to different tabs using only the keyboard.

Of course, I also need UTF8 support. And I want TeX syntax
highlighting and very much want bracket matching.

Maybe Ultraedit supports all this, but last I knew, it is not free. Is
there any free programs for Windows to meet these requirements?
Vim/emacs?

Dan


On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 11:55 PM, David Crosswell
<davidcrosswell at internode.on.net> wrote:
> On 23/03/13 01:20, Uwe Lück wrote:
>> Steve,
>>
>> Am Donnerstag, den 21.03.2013, 14:01 -0400 schrieb Steven Pisano:
>>> Barbara, Thomas:
>
> Try jedit.
>
> http://www.jedit.org/
>
> I use it for other work and it handles just about anything.
> Kind regards,
>
> David
>
>>>
>>> Thank you so much for your input, and helping along a newbie.
>>>
>>> Here is a sample file (.txt) I edited (along with original ".tex" file).
>>> Without being specific, the publisher told me I could not give them
>>> a "txt" file because "characters will not appear correctly in ASCII format."
>> I see that actually a mistake happened, rev-1.tex.txt has question
>> marks where in 1.tex are quotation marks.
>>
>> It is correct that you should not send ASCII files.
>> But ASCII is not the same as plain text.
>>
>> ASCII means that only (at most) the first 128 "characters"
>> are preserved.  The more recent ISO-8859 encodings preserve
>> (almost) 256 characters.  They suffice for "Latin" alphabets,
>> especially they can handle many accents, currency symbols, ...
>> that cannot be encoded by ASCII.
>>
>> The standard today is to encode much more than 256 characters,
>> by Unicode.  With the standard UTF-8 encoding, in general one
>> character cannot be represented by a single byte.
>> This is a difficulty for certain TeX versions,
>> some care is needed to deal with 2-byte characters.
>>
>> But still it is plain text, and .tex files are plain text files.
>>
>> You should not make .tex.txt files.  This is may be a difficulty
>> with Word: saving "as plain text" what Word internally handles
>> as something binary, and then that funny program adds the
>> .txt extension.
>>
>> You should simply edit the .tex files, without changing their
>> names, at least keep the extension .tex.
>>
>>> So, all "wars" aside, what I guess I need to know is that if Word
>>> could inadvertently introduce artifacts that would prevent or interfere
>>> with TeX compiling the file correctly, all I need to use is a bare bones
>>> editor that will enable me to give a ".tex" file back to the publisher.
>> There are probably ways to avoid such mistakes with Word,
>> and mistakes can happen with plain text editors as well.
>> I would just say that Word is too heavy for the task.
>>
>> A plain text editor usually does not change the encoding,
>> but I have experienced difficulties with that.
>>
>> Especially, I just had an experience where I received ISO-8859
>> files, while my editor by default saves as UTF-8.  This actually
>> broke the TeX runs.  The text editor I used for this task is in
>> my view not very helpful about encodings, but I found a way.
>> I needed a trick to corroborate my suspicion that the original
>> encoding was 1-byte and that I should keep 1-byte encoding.
>> The fogging editor allowed saving "as ISO 8859-15" as an
>> alternative to UTF-8.  That was OK, although the encoding
>> probably was ISO 8859-1 and the editor displayed some symbols
>> wrongly.  I just needed to save "in 1-byte mode".
>>
>> That was just a story, it was on Linux.  If you are on Windows,
>> I cannot tell you much, have not worked with it for some years.
>> You might just try Notepad and first clarify its behaviour
>> with encodings on examples, we might help here about that.
>>
>>> I am not creating dvi files. I am not 'typesetting' the book.
>>>
>>> I am only doing "language editing," not actually editing the equations
>> Then I would consider it bad to get an entire TeX installation.
>> But it would be good if you had an editor with TeX syntax highlighting.
>>
>> The terrible gedit that I used here on Ubuntu-Linux at least is
>> great in that it provides TeX syntax highlighting without requiring
>> a TeX installation.  Maybe you can find something similar,
>> maybe you could switch to Linux, it is not so difficult today!
>> You could simply, as I have done, buy a little laptop and install
>> Linux on it, as an alternative to the computer you mainly use.
>> This may be easier than learning how to choose the operating
>> system while booting or create hard disk partitions for different
>> operating systems.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>>     Uwe.
>>
>>
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