mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

Hi all,

It seems that time is to short in order to organize
a useful meeting; those people who contacted me are
mostly available at incompatible dates, or non expert
as to the brainstorming sessions.

I therefore decided to cancel the meeting this time.
We just finished a new proposal today. In case of acceptance,
we should have money for organizing another one later,
and we will be able to foresee longer in advance.

Best wishes, Joris


On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 09:51:59PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We plan to organize a TeXmacs meeting nearby Paris from december 8
> until december 10 or 11. The main aim of the meeting is to make
> rapid technical progress on the Qt interface for TeXmacs and
> a native Windows port based on this interface. We have some
> funding for people, even abroad, who can help on these topics.
> We will also use the opportunity for meeting together
> in order to discuss future development policies and
> the association Alise we were up to launch last year.
> 
> If you are interested by the meeting, then please drop me (Joris)
> an email. If you need us to pay train/plane tickets or a hotel room,
> then please tell me so. There is money for paying a full trip + stay
> for several participants. If many people are interested, then we will
> priviledge those who can help fulfilling the above objectives.
> Please forward the message to any of your friends or collegues
> who are experts on Qt and/or Windows and who might be interested
> to come over and help us.
> 
> Below follows a list of open issues and other points which you may
> wish to look at in order to prepare a successful meeting.
> 
> Best wishes, Joris
> 
> 
> General
> -------
> * Please bring your laptops and prepare for compiling Qt-TeXmacs.
> * We are especially interested in laptops with different versions of 
> Windows.
>   Please take a look at MinGW and try to figure out how to install
>   the TeXmacs dependencies (Guile, etc.) in such a way that TeXmacs 
> compiles.
> * Other TeXmacs icons?
> * A new name for TeXmacs?
> 
> Important Qt-related issues
> ---------------------------
> * Debug the Qt port with respect to memory consumption.
> * Debug the bad interaction between Guile and Qt which is probably
>   responsible for the crash with Qt 4.4 under X11.
> * Resolve the issues with the shadow renderer in relation with the
>   graphics mode (maybe change the way the mode works: introduce the
>   concept of temporary objects like cursors or do explicit caching of
>   dirty areas in the graphic mode code).
> 
> Completion of Qt-based interface
> --------------------------------
> * A clean minibuffer to do interaction 'a la Emacs' like in x11.
> * Improve and complete all the dialogs (images, directories, ....)
> * Still some (not very difficult) unimplemented bits (check TODO):
>   set_mouse_pointer, show_wait_indicator, handle quit command in
>   texmacs_widget, implement glue_widget (is it used somewhere?).
> 
> Other Qt-related issues
> -----------------------
> * Investigate the possibility of using cairo with the x11 widgets (widkit).
> * Investigate the possibility of using the cairo renderer to export
>   directly to PDF.
> * Under mac it should be possible to do without ghostscript. In
>   general: do we really need mandatory ghostscript in the Qt port?
>   (convert the existing ps images in some other format svg or png which
>   Qt can handle)
> * In the renderer the coordinates are explicitly converted between SI
>   (internal texmacs integer coords) and graphics api coordinates. In
>   modern graphics API however there is the concept of user coordinate
>   system so a-priori this explicit conversion is not necessary.
>   Investigate feasibility of removing all the calls to encode/decode,
>   etc...
> * Add markers (maybe a small downward arrow) for the toolbar
>   buttons which have submenus?
> 
> Windows (and MacOS-X) port(s)
> -----------------------------
> * Determine a minimal setup for compilation under Windows.
> * Determine setup for cross-compilation from Linux or MacOSX to Windows.
> * Remove the shell file under mac and win, investigate the possibility
>   of use Qt application setting mechanism to replace environment variables.
> * How to deal with system() calls portably?
>   (apparently this problem was solved in the old win port by Dan Martens,
>   who wrote some interface code, look at windows directory on the CVS).
> * A clean Xcode project would speed up development and debugging under mac.
>   More generally, should we use another configuration/makefile mechanism?