[TxMt] Reformat paragraph and the LaTeX mode

[Eric Hsu]

At 8:16 AM -0600 1/9/06, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
>On Jan 9, 2006, at 3:59 AM, Marco Kuhlmann wrote:
>>No, tidy does not really do what I want to achieve here.  I also 
>>must admit that the LaTeX bundle's authors' idea of tidyness does 
>>not really match mine ... ;-)
>>
>I think Eric Hsu is responsible for the perl script used, and he 
>seems to have it pretty well documented. It resides in 
>Library/Application 
>Support/TextMate/Bundles/Latex.tmbundle/Support/bin
>so you could try to toggle it to suit your purposes, it does a lot 
>of stuff that most some people might not like I guess. He is in the 
>mailing list I think, so he might add his input when he gets a 
>chance. I personally have never used the script.

Hi. The tidy script is pretty simple and (as I recall) was a hack to 
tab indent to allow intelligent folding of LaTeX documents. I wrote 
it in 2004 so it's fuzzy in my mind. Everyone is welcome to improve 
it.

>>Reformat Paragraph is really close to what I want, and in fact 
>>would be exactly what I want, if a paragraph would indeed be a 
>>logical LaTeX paragraph (rather than a textual paragraph) for 
>>Textmate.

I don't understand what that means, but I'm not a LaTeX geek. Does 
that mean that you want a command to remove all line breaks and 
insert breaks before logical separators, like \item and \section, 
etc.?   How far away is LaTeX Tidy, assuming it could work on a 
selection?

>>So do I get you right that it is not possible for a language 
>>definition to specify what it counts as a paragraph?
>>
>That is correct, to the best of my knowledge.
>You could ask it as a feature request, though it will probably have 
>to wait until 2.0 at least.

It seems like it would be a straightforward command to write.  I 
would think the fastest thing to do would be to write a little 
command that inserts line breaks before all the things you don't want 
broken and then run a macro to Reformat Paragraph and then run your 
little command.

The insert line break command would be something like (off the cuff)

perl -pe "s/(\\item|\\section|\\subsection)/\n$1/g"

Good luck. If you can't do it, perhaps someone else on the list with 
some time, or wanting to practice writing a simple TM command could 
do it...  My wonderful 7-month old daughter has reduced my 
programming productivity...

best, Eric

ps. The LaTeX bundle has changed a lot (in cool ways) since I last 
worked on it. However, I don't get why there is no built-in way to 
wrap text in \[ \] or \( \), since this is by far the most common 
move I make.  Does anyone have objections to me adding such commands? 
If so, what is the recommended way of doing this with the existing 
bundle?
-- 
Eric Hsu, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
San Francisco State University
erichsu at math.sfsu.edu
http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu