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Re: modify TeX itself to enable WYSIWYG


Chronological Thread 
  • From: David Allouche <address@hidden>
  • To: address@hidden
  • Subject: Re: modify TeX itself to enable WYSIWYG
  • Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 14:19:27 +0200
On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 09:19:43PM -0700, Salman Khilji wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
> You can develop on Linux and then ask someone who has a license to Qt Win
> to
> compile the app for you. This is legal.

Yes it is.

But distributing the resulting binary is illegal. What this mean is
that only the person who actually compiled the executable can use it.
Otherwise, the person who compiled the executable and distributed it
is in violation.

Asking each of your users individually to acquire a Qt developper
license, compile their own undistributable executable, and explaining
them they cannot legally share the resulting executable and why is
probably not what you want to do if you want to make something
convenient to users.


> wxWindows is good as well, but I find that it lacks polish that I find in
> Qt.
> The win32 port of GTK clearly mentions of random crashes on the website.
> So
> for right now the only quality toolkit at hand is Qt. Situation may change
> as mono from ximian matures.

So, as far as we are concerned, there is no quality toolkit for win32.
Qt-win32 is not acceptable because it is non-free GPL-incompatible
software.


> As far as the custom code to render menus, whats wrong with simply taking
> the
> Qt or wxWindows default? I don't mind whatever way the menus are rendered.
>
> I think providing the default menus are actually better and less confusing
> than the current menu system of TeXmacs. I think trying to render them the
> way they are currently rendered is asking for a performance penalty at
> startup, isn't so?

Quite so. But I am not the one you have to talk through this. I
essentially agree with you on that point.

Also, you should note that it is necessary at least to render the
symbol menus correctly using the custom fonts.


> Someone over the groups said something about bugs in the teXmacs
> typesetting
> engine and expressed some discouragement about the # of reported bugs in
> TeXmacs typesetting. I personally don't have much experience with TeXmacs
> to
> say anything about it. Thats why I have this "TeX fetish".

I share the annoyance with you on that point. I have been reporting
some critical problems in the typesetter years ago and Joris has not
yet come up to fixing them.

But I disagree on the solution. It would be simpler and better just to
fix TeXmacs. I do not say that would be easy though. But that would be
much, much easier than what you are set to do.


> I really like the editor display of TeXmacs. Unfortunately, I did find a
> lot
> of annoyances (without finding any solutions) while trying to write a small
> document with TeXmacs. Unfortunately, the kind fo problems that I am
> talking
> about can only be explained while a TeXmacs guru is right next to me (live)
> watching me trying to struggle with moving the mouse cursor over page
> breaks...how to set breaks....working with graphics.. etc. I really cannot
> explain these kinds of problems with words........

Page breaks and graphics are areas of the user experience which are
known to be problematic. If you have some suggestion on how to do this
better you are welcome. If you want help implementing this better ways
you are also welcome.

In an nutshell:

Generally, Joris plans to add a margin which would indicate the
position of some important invisible markup.

There are ways to actually make invisible markup visible. Currently
they a require a bit of hacking. A good integrated plugin offerring
a "show markup" functionnality would be quite useful.

When the current reorganizations are complete it should be possible
to do this more cleanly (typesetter primitives should become
extensible and customizable).

There is a identified bug using page-break (compare to new-page) on
underfull pages. I cannot make head and tail of the page breaking
code, but if your are confident enough to start your project you
probably are able to fix this problem quickly.

Graphics should definitely be easier to operate one. I think that
Ghostscript should not be used to render included graphics because
it is way too slow. Libmagick is probably what I would like to use.

It should be possible to operate on graphics by mouse
click-and-drag instead of having to disable them and edit their
values. Also recently posted a message to texmacs-users which goes
in great detail explaining how to use graphics.


> I once thought about creating a flash video of me trying to do
> something with TeX and graphically ask a question. Unfortunately I
> cannot post big binaries in a group like this. Is there anyway
> someone can suggest a way for me to ask questions like these?

Well, put this on your webspace and we would have a look.

At least in France, it is not difficult to obtain a free (as in beer)
100MB, FTP-accessible, webspace.

--
-- ddaa

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