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I am helping a retired professor to migrate from his old computer (old Mac OS), that has TeXtures installed. The company that created TeXtures is gone, so I am looking at MacTeX, combined with TeXShop, which seems to be a good replacement.

He has an extensive amount of TeX documents and I am testing the workflow. Everything looks good except for one minor issue: he uses a lot of custom macros, he wrote and accumulated over the years. His workflow in TeXtures depended on these macros along with higher level macros.

Here is my question. Is there a user directory, where these macros can be placed, so TeXShop will find them? It seems there is a user library structure created in ~/Library/TeXShop/Macros. Is that the correct location?

naphaneal
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Kevin
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  • you should be able to import said macros via Macros -> Add macros from file in TeXshop. – naphaneal Jun 17 '19 at 11:36
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    Are you sure macros for textures can be used with texshop? Or are there tex/latex macros? Which are something completely different and should just be placed to latex can find them. – daleif Jun 17 '19 at 11:45
  • @naphaneal Apart from the fact that we don't actually know what 'macros' refers to here, the chances that editor macros from a now very old Mac program could be imported into TeXShop directly are vanishingly small. – Alan Munn Jun 17 '19 at 15:08

1 Answers1

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If the macros are, in fact, just TeX/LaTeX commands, then put them into a package file, say mycmds.sty and include \usepackage{mycmds} in the document preamble.

Or, in TeXShop, use menu item Help > TeXShop Feature Confusion to display the pdf file "TeXShop's Key Bindings vs Macros vs Command Completion" (by Herbert Schulz).

In TeXShop, don't overlook the possibility of using the command-completion mechanism where you type a (short) string in your document, hit the Esc key (by default), and the string is replaced by whatever text (including possibly placeholders for arguments you subsequently type in, or new lines, etc.) that you have specified (in the file ~/Library/TeXShop/CommandCompletion/CommandCompletion.txt).

For example, if in a source document I type fig and press the Esc key, I get this in my file:

%
\begin{figure}[htb]
\centering
\framebox[width][c]{\rule{0pt}{height}} % image file
\caption{}
\label{fig:}
\end{figure}
%

As another example, if I type ch and press Esc, I get...

\chapter{•}\label{Ch:•}
•

...with the cursor automatically positioned at the placeholder inside the first pair of braces, and after typing text there for the chapter title, pressing Cmd-Ctrl-F positions the cursor to the next placeholder, for the label, etc.

murray
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  • Hi All. I am sorry that I was more specific but thanks for the detailed replies. These macros are just plain TeX macros and not TeXtures macros. I am not a TeXShop user and it wasn't clear to me where to place plain TeX macros. – Kevin Jun 17 '19 at 21:02