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From: cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob McMahon)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Common TeX
Message-ID: <1990Nov20.090616.1571@warwick.ac.uk>
Date: 20 Nov 90 09:06:16 GMT
References: <1990Nov14.150714.15442@cnix.uucp> <1990Nov15.085657.2589@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
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In article <1990Nov19.192320.25129@warwick.ac.uk> cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob
McMahon) I compounded a crime by following up to a flame with another flame,
making comments that would have been better made via email.  This article is
an attempt to correct that (if I can spell supersedes :-).  Please accept my
apologies.

In article <1990Nov15.085657.2589@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
marcel@cs.caltech.edu writes: 
>In article <1990Nov14.150714.15442@cnix.uucp> klaus u schallhorn
>(klaus@cnix.uucp) writes:
>> I would have loved to
>>     cat whatever | tex | lpr -dvi
>
>Do you?  Why do you prefer typing "cat whatever.tex | tex" instead of "tex
>whatever"? The desire to type 7 extra characters is very unlike UNIX.

I don't think he literally meant `cat'.  I've often wanted to use TeX as a
filter, without having to create and tidy up unnecessary temporary files.

>> Next thing I noticed, you can't ^C out of TeX, [...]
>The TeX versions I have seen (yes, under UNIX) all react to a ctrl-C with a
>prompt, at which you can, among other things, type an X to terminate the
>program.

Sometimes you just want it to die, sometimes you don't want a prompt.  Why
else did I type ^C if I didn't want you to go away ... this is all part of the
same thing, trying to use TeX in a script when it expects to be run
interactively.  (Yes, I know about \batchmode.)

>And you would "love" to pipe your text with all those errors directly into
>lpr?

Sometimes, yes, when the errors are along the lines of `underfull hbox'.

>I can assure you, if you write complicated macros, every bit of information
>you can get is welcome in case of errors.

Great, for a `tex -i' when you're debugging, or a `tex -v' when you want to
see verbose errors.  Or it could even use `isatty(0)' to select between modes
at a pinch.  Normally all I want is a list of line numbers and what error
occurred there.

>One way to get rid of error messages is to type Q at the first error
>prompt.

*If there's someone there to type to it*.  You're assuming a particular mode
of use.  This is not the Unix way.  I ought to be able to do

	prog | tex 2>/dev/null | lpr -d

say from a cron job.  If I really want a log file, I'll redirect stderr to it
thank you, I don't need TeX to do it for me automatically.

A better answer at the moment is `tex \\batchmode\\input file', but you still
have to provide the input in file.tex, get the logfile in file.log, and accept
the output file.dvi.

>Amazingly, according to Piercarlo Grandi (pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk) and Doug
>McDonald (mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu), Knuth's program is some terrible hack
>whereas Common TeX is a beauty.

I think the comments were more along the lines of `it can be compiled to be
more efficient, works on more systems, and can more easily be worked with'.  I
certainly always used to use Common TeX before web2c arrived.  Trying to write
change files is just a nightmare.

Using C also allows the option of removing the fixed sized buffers, so that
small jobs run small, and large jobs don't run out of space and advise to to
recompile TeX (I don't know if this has been done in Common TeX yet, though,
the last copy I used still used fixed sized buffers).

Rob
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Rob McMahon, Computing Services, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, England