Re: [toolbox] Extended Attributes

[Maxwell, A. R <ada...@pn...>]

On Jul 5, 2005, at 15:19, Will Robertson wrote:

> On 6 Jul 2005, at 7:03 AM, Maxwell, Adam R wrote:
>
>
>> If you store aliases as data in a plist, though (BDAlias is handy  
>> for this), renaming isn't a problem for the front-end specific info.
>>
>
> Ooo, that sounds much nicer than hard coded links at the top of the  
> document...(even if they are relative)

To quote Jon Guyer, earlier in this thread: "Aliases are such a  
vastly superior technology to unix symbolic links that  it's not even  
funny."

And this is one of the reasons we use OS X, right?  BTW, one of the  
reasons we want to get BibDesk away from using BibTeX as a storage  
format is that PDF files and such can be linked as aliases, so  
renaming and moving them outside the app is transparent.

>
>
>> Why put the name of the master file in the slaves if TeX doesn't  
>> need it (or maybe it does...I'm not much of a TeXpert)?
>>
>
> So that when you open up the chapter file you're working on that  
> doesn't have anything but document text, you can still hit  
> "Typeset" and have something come out :)

Right, but is that specific to the front end, or does TeX itself use  
that info?  I use iTeXMac's projects to define a master file, so I've  
not explored putting this stuff in the file.

>
>
>> I think XeTeX accepts either UTF-16 or UTF-8.  Also, trying to  
>> read Latin 1 files in as UTF-8 will cause an error in Cocoa, and  
>> you get nothing back (although this is arguably better than the  
>> corruption you get when reading MacOSRoman as UTF-8 or something).
>>
>
> In that case, it sounds like a "checksum" string at the end of the  
> document that is unique for each encoding (is this even possible?)  
> is the only way to do it if the information is going to be kept in- 
> file.

Not sure if that's possible; you're thinking of something along the  
lines of the Unicode BOM?.  Apple and Omni Group both have tools for  
sniffing text encoding, but it's a pretty dodgy business at best.


Adam