[TxMt] LaTeX formats

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Feb 4, 2007, at 4:21 PM, Juan wrote:

> 	Thanks Charilaos
>
> probably you have never used dumped preformated nor perhaps LaTeX  
> at all.

I am actually one of the maintainers of the LaTeX bundle, and using  
LaTeX for more than 7 years now on a daily basis. But I have never  
had the need to learn about .fmt files at all. Also, a google search  
for "dumped preformated" or even "latex dumped preformated" does not  
really return any meaningful results, so are you sure you are using  
the right terminology? The LaTeX Companion doesn't seem to have much  
info on these fmt files either. So I doubt this is something that an  
average LaTeX user sees in front of them. (Probably because most of  
them are happy with latex.fmt or whatever the default one is.)

You are right though that i have never used dumped preformated,  
whatever they are. Anyway, moving on,

> This could justify that you didnt' never seen any first line like that
> 	%&format
> as you can see, %& are the initial characters.  They must be at the  
> first line and since many years (OzTeX and previous) did hep to  
> change formats and avoid complex usepackages at the start of your  
> latex sources
>
> TeXShop, OzTeX and many others recognize that "format" like the  
> format.fmt file it must use in
>
> 	pdflatex -format format  source.tex

We should be able to make this change easily, I'll try to find some  
time this week to fix this on the subversion version of the bundle.

>>> Another good thing it should do could be to retypeset it until no  
>>> warnings and rebuild bibtex... etc.
>>
>> Bundles -> Latex -> Help. Look at section 2.2 about Using latexmk.pl
>
> 	If you typeset for first time a source.tex, there are no aux, log,  
> etc, files there and it is very easy to recognize that situations  
> and then retypeset one or two times more until all the Table of  
> Contents were correctly updated

But most of the times you are already typesetting a document you have  
typeset before, so the absence of such files is not a very good  
indicator that a recompile is needed, especially if things like TOC  
don't need to be created. In any case, my point is that by telling  
TextMate to use latexmk.pl as per the instructions in the help file,  
it will compile the required number of times as you want.

And of course, you can always provide for it your very own script to  
do the compiling as you want it.

> Thanks again.

Haris