[texhax] What program can I use to edit TeX files?

Barbara Beeton bnb at ams.org
Thu Mar 21 19:53:55 CET 2013


(not murray, but i've had a lot of experience
editing tex files.)

    Would a newbie like myself just be better off installing MacTex, as you suggest, or would I be better off steering clear if it requires a TeX expertise I don't have?
    
    All I'm doing is editing the language in the .tex files. I am not editing equations. (Though I have a PDF version of each chapter I am editing which I am looking at too just in case things like an unmatched fence were missed.)
    
    I'm just looking for the simplest, easiest route to editing the basic language part of the files, without possibly introducing encoding problems that could throw TeX off later, and being able to give a ".tex" file back to the publisher.

i think it's possible to do the editing,
provided that the author hasn't used a
lot of tex commands *in the text*.  you
might ask to take a look at the file(s)
before you agree to do the editing.  if
they are generally free of any commands
that begin with the backslash \ you are
probably safe.  if you have to deal with
author-defined commands, and you don't
know much about tex conventions, you're
possibly in for a hard time.

the closer the source is to "plain text"
(that's quite different from "plain tex"!),
the safer you'll be.

good luck.
						-- bb


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