mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

Andrea Gamba wrote:

> Hi Alfe,
>
>  
>
> > > It would be much better if the production of the pdf or of the new document
> > > were treated as background jobs, so that the user could continue to interact
> > > with the program during their completion.
> > >      
>
>  
>
> > To solve this problem, TeXmacs would have to create the PDF from an 
> > internally created copy of the current document (whose creation might be a 
> > similar long-running task as the PDF creation).
> >    
>
> I think it should work exactly as you say. Just copying the document is not a
> long-running task because it involves no computation at all. More precisely,
> what you would do would be to pipe the document to a separate job that would 
> do
> the processing.
>
> I think the convenience of not having to stop working until the end of the
> process is huge.
Isn't it a little bit overkill :-). Really, if you
are printing your document, its most likely because
you think you finished modify it.

> It breaks the continuity of your work. For instance, I may be
> willing to see the results of work done on one section and meanwhile start
> looking at the following section, but I cannot do it because the pdf takes 
> some
> minute to be composed (and it's not in the background as it could be).
Another (much more simple) solution: open
another TeXmacs for printing !

Either you cut & paste from the 1st TeXmacs to the
next, & then print, or either you save your section
in the first TeXmacs, and open another one with the
file containing the section & then you print.

Perhaps even one could think about automating these
kinds of maneuverings, and in the case of such a
design, you can implement it by means of scripting
TeXmacs: thus you can do it yourself.

The other approach you propose looks like it would
be necessary to change the C++ codebase of TeXmacs.

In such a case, you would wait a very long (and possibly
infinite) time for having this thing implemented, IMHO.