[Texmacs-dev] Running without a GUI plus other ideas and tasks

[Miguel de Benito Delgado]

Hi all,

  in my quest for a deeper understanding of the code (well, any understanding at all would be nice right now), I've come up with the idea of writing a QuickLook plugin for MacOS, i.e. a quick .tm to .pdf renderer which applications like Finder call to get a nice preview of files. Command line options exist already in TeXmacs which basically call the relevant scheme stuff: "-c in out" does a texmacs-load-buffer in followed by export-buffer out (wich is sort of an alias for print_to_file, right?) and then "-q" quits TeXmacs. Sadly enough this won't do because a gui is created in the startup process and an ugly window pops in and out of existence before the bewildered eyes of the user who just expected a flawless-MacOS-like-preview of some file.

  Stupid, blindfolded commenting out of mostly random lines proved a waste of time, so a bit of list-digging got me to http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/texmacs-dev/2007-11/msg00000.html, and the notion that it might be easier to implement some sort of dummy gui-without-gui plugin than to tackle the issue of building a (usable) library out of the existing code, especially since I am most definitely not ready for the latter (nor am I likely to be any time soon, for that matter.)

  Any comments? One very welcome suggestion indeed would be another task to focus on, sufficiently uncoupled from the main development process as to make it something I can encompass without being totally absorbed in it, which I can't afford. There are a couple of things that I'd also like to have in TM for my daily use, namely graphical configuration of shortcuts (to quickly fix those that don't work for some reason or other) and better image support (scaling, embedding, eps bugs fixing, etc.), but they look pretty daunting to me. Maybe not the first, if I convince someone (<cough>) to explain to me how the keyboard shortcuts system works.

Thanks,

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Miguel de  Benito.