Re: [Texmacs-dev] Roadmap porting TeXmacs and the TMGUI API

[Stéphane Payrard]

On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 08:33:01PM +0200, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> > My goal is to complete  shallow Qt and shallow Perl
> > as soon as possible.
> 
> Great. So I convinced you to port the x_display (now that I got
> more and more convinced that we can indeed bypass this step...).
> 
> > This combination will be already so powerful that
> > I will put up a site called nemo.mongueurs.net
> 
> OK; do you plan to support CVS access there so that I, David or
> others can help you on certain points whenever this is appropriate?

This site is not yet about source and it will not be TeXmacs sources
but sources using TeXmaccs.  Indeed it will publicize what we will be
able to do with perl and TeXmacs once I will have shallow Qt + shallow
Perl done.  I have no reason to fork what rightly belongs to TeXmacs.

> 
> > But real acceptance can come only if I get to medium TeXmacs
> > so that people will be able to use TeXmacs without Guile
> > knowledge.
> 
> Maybe, but wouldn't it be better to uncouple the TMGUI API
> from using Perl or not? These should really be independent issues.
> I am not against having some command line option in order to
> support Perl (later we will do better, but this seems to be
> a good temporary solution), but I think that the perl support
> should not be mixed up with Qt.

We will be able to use the Qt loop without Perl and without
any Qt widget. That is what the shallow Qt port is about.

> 
> > Probably, the first example will be to use the
> > POE::Component::Client::HTTP to pull web pages while updating the
> > status line. Currently we use curl or whatever and we don't get any
> > feedback about the loading of a page.  BTW: this means that the
> > tm_widget interface is public.
> 
> I do not follow you completely.

This just an exemple of what shallow Qt + shallow perl will buy us.

> 
> > I am curious to know how we we can display in TeXmacs stuff-as-we-load
> > it. How can we do it without exposing too much API.  In fact modern
> > HTML browsers act as if they had already seen closing HTML tags.  For
> > example they display as much of a table they have already seen.
> 
> We will do this, but later; I believe that we should not mix up
> complicated changes inside TeXmacs with porting TeXmacs to another toolkit.
> We will be able to do what you want, but I prefer to proceed by
> clean steps before I get crazy. Don't forget that there are many other
> developers and users with all sorts of questions, requests and problems...
> 
> > BTW: Do we have a table implementation that can
> > handle HTML tables? For example: I am unable to justify text
> > in table cells. Is it possible?
> 
> Yes it is, you should enable hyphenation in the cells.

I have not figured out yet how it work. Once I know it is working I
can write a filter.  Perl is the language for that kind of thing.

Now, I am not conviced because I have not figured out how to get
hypehnation on cells.  I create a table, select a cell (rightmost if
it matters), set multiparagraph hyphenation. Paste stuff in the cell.
And it just expands so that the table gets larger.



> However, we do not have good Html <-> TeXmacs converters yet.
> This really should be the first step before getting all this to work.
> But I plan to work on this soon.

--
  stef