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modify TeX itself to enable WYSIWYG


Chronological Thread 
  • From: David Allouche <address@hidden>
  • To: address@hidden
  • Subject: modify TeX itself to enable WYSIWYG
  • Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 02:16:59 +0200
On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 06:58:38PM -0700, Salman Khilji wrote:
>
> The reason I posted earlier about running teXmacs in debug was that I
> wanted
> to investigate what it would take to:
>
> 1) modify TeX itself to enable WYSIWYG
> 2) Steal fon't drawing and misc code from TeXmacs and create a
> cross-platform
> Qt based WYSIWYG TeX/LateX editor.
> 3) Get rid of TeXmacs typesetting code and replace it with modified version
> of
> TeX compiled as a shared object.

It seems highly unlikely that you could ever achieve that. But then,
some people probably thought the same of texmacs back then when Joris
started working on it.

TeX is intriscally designed for batch processing and is not amenable
to realtime interactive editing. One of the reasons here is that TeX
is actually a programming langague and not a data format. TeX
documents lack any form of inherent structure, and having some amount
of document structure is a requirement to provide a good interactive
user experience.

Also, if you get rid of texmacs typesetting code, you mostly have
nothing left because there is not distinction in TeXmacs between the
editor and the typesetter. They are the basically same thing.

If your goal is using a powerful, modern, typesetting enviroment with
a WYSIWYG interface, what you want is TeXmacs. Not something which
uses TeX.

If you have a fetish with TeX, you should better look at LyX, they
have been putting a lot of thought in the problem. TeXmacs goal is
much more ambitious than that: its goal is to do something _much
better_ than TeX.

We are interested in all contributions, and especially in improving
the TeX/LaTeX conversion filters (we have a regular contributor of
fixes and some students will be working on it this summer). We
especially need some TeX guru here to help us make those converters
really good.


> The new editor's native file-format would be that of TeX. Meaning
> that someone could take a *.tex file and edit it directly instead of
> doing conversions.

We do have a project in TeXmacs to support native editing of foreign
file formats. The design we are thinking of would be generic enough to
support some reasonable subsets of TeX. If you are a really good
programmer and have a some hundred hours to contribute, you are
welcome to help with this.


> Yes TeXmacs may run under cygwin, but cygwin is not the answer. Its
> too messy to work with. I would rather have a native windows binary
> done with either wxWindows or Qt.

A Qt-Win32 port will probably never happen because the Qt-Win32
license is proprietary, and thus incompatible with the GPL. TeXmacs is
100% GPL.

Since the copyright is still very centralized it might be possible for
the copyright holders to make an exception, but unless you have some
very strong arguments I do not believe you will be allowed to do that.

WxWindows has also been considered, but according to Joris (I have not
investigated) the menu model is too inflexible to support the custom
font rendering used by texmacs. Well I find this weird, but I take his
word.

Nonetheless, a brute-force port (using a X11 emulation layer) is
currently in works. So TeXmacs on Win32 is not a distant prospect.

--
-- ddaa

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