Automated Scrivener to TeXShop workflow?

richardk · August 25, 2008, 1:10pm

Hi,

as will become pretty apparent from subsequent posts from me, I’m rather new to this whole MMD/LaTeX thing. Boy, this is a Beast!

I’m not that much of a tech person/programmer by your standard, probably, so have some patience please.

I aim to do as much as possible in Scrivener itself, and have no real desire to hack XSLT/LaTeX files unless absolutely necessary.
As a consequence my mode of work is p®etty trial-and-error. This means I have to take the following steps very often:

--E to open Scrivener’s “Compile Draft” pane
hitting to start the Export, which opens a Save File dialog
entering a filename
hitting twice to export and confirm a file overwrite
switching to TeXShop with -
hitting -W twice to close the Preview and TeX-file windows of the previous version of my document
mousing to File - Open Recent - filename.tex
hitting -T to typeset my document

Any suggestions for automating (part of) these steps are welcomed.
I was hoping to create Folder Actions with OS X’s Automator, but TeXShop doesn’t support this.

Thanks, Richard

cormullion · August 25, 2008, 6:36pm

You could probably eliminate some of the TeXShop steps because that’s mostly a GUI way of running commands on the command line. Those commands could also be run by AppleScript. The Finder can have folder actions so that a file added to a folder is automatically processed by an AppleScript. You could choose an AppleScript command from the Scripts menu inside Scrivener to do all this (it doesn’t require Scrivener to be completely applescriptable).

It’s all possible, just yet more stuff to learn!

tobinharris · December 13, 2008, 3:53pm

I’m wondering the same thing. I’m using ruby Rake to automate my book writing process (extracting code from relevant solutions, clobbering temp files etc).

I’d love to find a way of getting Scrivener to export the Multimarkdown file from the command line.

Something like:

Scrivener -export mmd > ./Book/Export/export.txt

Or even if I could invoke an AppleScript to automate it whilst Scrivener is open.

Are any of these options possible?

AmberV · December 15, 2008, 8:21pm

Scrivener doesn’t have an AS dictionary yet, so no, I know of no way to automate the compile process. You can certainly automate the rest though. Just throw an AS onto the folder you export to, and have it handle the automation as soon as a .txt file hits it. So while you couldn’t automate Scrivener to do its thing, you could initiate the entire string of events from within Scrivener.

whaynes · February 24, 2009, 8:11pm

I wrote a little Applescript which does exactly this. When I use it my workflow becomes

Open Scrivener’s “Compile Draft” pane
Hit twice to start the Export, and export “Untitled.tex”

It’s a folder action script, and it uses Growl http://growl.info/ for notification.

To install and use: save the script in ~/library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ and then attach it to a convenient folder by control clicking on the selected folder, and choosing More…>Attach a folder action…. From Scrivener, Compile Draft… a MMD->LaTeX file into the selected folder, and the script will take over and typeset and display it.

No warrantees, use at your own risk, of course! Read the script before using. You can download it from dl.getdropbox.com/u/371846/TexFolderWatcher.scpt

signinstranger · February 24, 2009, 11:29pm

Thanks for sharing this! I never got round to making my own, so his is very helpful.

BTW: I’ve noticed that in your script you check the file type against “TeX Document”, which will only work when the system locale is english.

Sophie · March 21, 2009, 7:50am

Thanks, that makes the flow much nicer.

I had to make TexShop run typeset twice (so it gets things like Contents correct), by trial and error yielding this:

tell application "TeXShop"
	close every document
	open f
	typeset document 1
	activate
	close every document
	open f
	typeset document 1
	activate
end tell

Thanks again.

AmberV · March 21, 2009, 4:06pm

That is fairly standard LaTeX procedure for documents containing dynamic data. Anything with cross-references, indexing, table of contents, word counts, et cetera should be rendered twice or thrice. I believe it has something to do with the LaTeX engine being a strictly linear process. It starts at the top of your file and renders downward, thus it doesn’t have data about the specifics falling below the current render line. If the cross-reference points to a label that hasn’t been instantiated yet, it ignores it. Second time through it has become of aware of all the label names and page number positions from the first pass, so it can fill in that missing data. Some say you should run thrice, but twice has always worked fine for me.

whaynes · March 21, 2009, 11:39pm

Glad to hear that people are finding this script useful.

fastfingers · March 29, 2009, 3:34pm

Whyanes, first of all, thank you for your script and also the lead it provides into further capabilities. Very handy. And thanks to Sophie for the explanation showing how to extend the script to do multiple type setting passes on a document.

There was a comment made about the number of “passes” TeXShop needs to make on a document and I thought I would add my own experience. For the book I am writing, the following process is used. I keep this documented inside my Scrivener Manuscript as a page that is not included in the final document. A handy aid within Scrivener. Here are the steps I use:

To create a PDF file of this book:

1.	compile this document (Command-Option-E)
2.	open up the .tex file with TexShop
3.	process the file the first time for latex (Command-Shift-L)
4.	fix any errors and restart whole process if they happened
5.	run latex processing again to create table of contents info (Command-Shift-L)
6.	convert the index file (Command-Shift-I)
7.	click back on main tex file in TexShop to continue
8.	run one more time to include the index in the table of contents (Command-Shift-L)
9.	run one latex again in case adding the index changed the length of the table of contents (Command-Shift-L)
10.	click back on main tex document again in TexShop
11.	clean up temporary files (Command-Control-A)
12.	In the Finder you will find your completed PDF

The short version:

Scrivener:
Cmd-Opt-E
TexShop:
Cmd-Shift-L
Cmd-Shift-L
Cmd-Shift-I
Cmd-Shift-L
Cmd-Shift-L
Cmd-Cntrl-A

So you can see I actually make 4 LaTeX passes through the document and also perform an Index creation step. Automating all this would be awesome, so I was excited to read this forum thread.

However, things don’t seem to be working so smoothly for me. Just getting the 2nd pass with TeXShop seems to fail. I’ve tried a number of script ideas, here’s one that I thought would work:

on TypesetDoc(f)
	set frontName to f's name
	growl("Typesetting", frontName)
	tell application "TeXShop"
		close every document
		open f
	end tell
	tell document frontName of application "TeXShop"
		latexinteractive
		growl("Just launched latex...", frontName)
		repeat
			delay 2
			if taskdone then
				exit repeat
			end if
		end repeat
		growl(frontName, "First pass completed.  Continue...")
		latex
		growl("Just launched 2nd pass latex...", frontName)
		repeat
			delay 2
			if taskdone then
				exit repeat
			end if
		end repeat
		growl("Done", frontName)
	end tell
end TypesetDoc

You can see some new things I learned from research. The issuing of the “latex” or “latexinteractive” command immediately returns to Applescript. You need to add in a check to see when TeXShop is completed, hence the repeat delay loop. However, it doesn’t work. I never see Growl report that the first pass completed.

Okay, figuring that maybe there’s a bug in the “taskdone” logic, I thought I could cheat by removing that bit of logic and just put in a long enough delay. That’s a bit of hack to depend in timing, but I’m troubleshooting. So I tried something like this:

		latexinteractive
		growl("Just launched latex...", frontName)
		delay 15
		growl(frontName, "First pass completed.  Continue...")
		latex
		growl("Just launched 2nd pass latex...", frontName)

Still no luck.

If there’s an issue with installed software versions, here’s what I’m running:

OS X 10.5.6
Applescript 2.0.1
TeXShop 2.26

I’m beginning to think that I could probably just create a custom Macro inside TeXShop to run the process for me each time. The create Bibliography script shows how to do something like that. Here’s my new Macro in TeXShop:

--Applescript

set fileName to #FILEPATH#
if fileName is equal to  ""
activate
display dialog "Please save the file first"  buttons {"OK"} default button "OK"
return
end if

set frontName to #DOCUMENTNAME#

tell document frontName of application "TeXShop"

	latexinteractive

	repeat
		delay 2
		if taskdone
			exit repeat
		end if
	end repeat

	latex

	repeat
		delay 2
		if taskdone
			exit repeat
		end if
	end repeat

	makeindex

	repeat
		delay 2
		if taskdone
			exit repeat
		end if
	end repeat

	latex

	repeat
		delay 2
		if taskdone
			exit repeat
		end if
	end repeat

	latex

	repeat
		delay 2
		if taskdone
			exit repeat
		end if
	end repeat

end tell

And guess what? When I run TeXShop and manually select that new Macro, it works. Maybe if I can get the Applescript folder watcher script to just tell TeXShop to run this Macro that would be great.

Any ideas?

signinstranger · March 29, 2009, 5:26pm

I probably shouldn’t tell you this, because it’s super secret, but TeXShop does actually come with latexmk, a perl script that automatically runs latex, makeindex, bibtex and other related commands for you.

Locate the following folder in Finder:

Move the files pdflatexmk.engine and xelatexmk.engine to

Make the following line the first line in all your .tex files

%!TEX TS-program = pdflatexmk

or

%!TEX TS-program = xelatexmk

if you want to use xelatex instead of pdflatex.

EDIT: Make sure that you have the latest version of TeXShop. You probably have to remove the folder

first and restart TeXShop to update all scripts.