Actually, LaTeX seems quite happy with the one dash as well.
I like the idea of a warning, in combination with the directive. Namely, if the directive is there follow it, as I think we do now. If it is not there but a package that needs it is loaded, then put up a warning, suggesting that the user add such a directive to the document.
Graham, this directive should work in TeXShop as well, that's where we got those directives from (In fact, TS is for TeXShop). If I remember correctly though, TeXShop is very picky about spaces or not around the equal sign, I can't remember what it expects but it is picky about it. But it is certainly an "editor" thing, not a "latex" thing, so it's up to each editor to support it or not, TeXShop started it I think. So that would be something to take up with the emacs folks.
Haris Skiadas Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hanover College
On Sep 2, 2008, at 8:39 AM, Mark Eli Kalderon wrote:
Not so paranoid about security, but for what it is worth here is a vote against enabling --shell escape by default.
The TeX directive is a good idea I think, but there is a potential wrinkle. XeTeX doesn't take --shell-escape but -shell-escape, that is, one dash preceding, not two. So running XeTeX with a document with the proposed TeX directive is going to throw up errors...
On 9/2/2008, "Brad Miller" millbr02@luther.edu wrote:
I don't know how people feel about the security issue, but the online docs I've found are pretty clear about not enabling --shell- escape for documents you haven't written yourself. I rarely download tex source and typeset it so this is not a big deal for me. Although texMate could auto-enable the shell-escape option by detecting certain packages it would have no way of knowing whether the user had written the document or not. Perhaps a middle ground would be to put up a warning if one of the packages is included and the user has not enabled shell-escape.
Rather than setting the global option to enable shell-escape users can also insert the following line at the top of their document: %! TEX TS-options = --shell-escape
This can be done manually or by using the File Preferences menu in the latex bundle.