Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: Hello

[Stéphane Payrard]

On (14/09/02 22:45), Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> From: Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>
> To: Dan Martens <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: [Texmacs-dev] Re: Hello
> Reply-To: address@hidden
> Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2002 22:45:54 +0200 (MET DST)
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > Hi, my name is Dan Martens.  I am a 4th year computer science\software
> > engineering student at the University Of Western Ontario in London,
> > Ontario Canada. For our final project\thesis to obtain our degree, our
> > (my group and I) mission is to port texmacs to the Windows 9x\2k
> > platform as desired in your contributions page.  If possible, I was
> > wondering if you could perhaps answer a few questions for me.  
> 
> This is a great project, and we are indeed very interested by this.
> 
> >   1) Do you currently have anyone else attempting this?

On the wiki, I talked about Gtk but I settled on QT because I find
it better documented. I avoided the higher level toolkit KDE
because Qt is high level enough and that KDE is not so stable.

> 
> We have started experimenting and discussing how to do this.
> Please take a look at the archives of the address@hidden
> mailing list. For further discussions, it would be good to suscribe
> to this list.
> 
> >   2) Have you attempted this in the past? 
> >      If so, what were the main problems in porting?
> 
> No, I have never really tried.
> Stéphane Payrard has recently started to port TeXmacs to Qt.
> He just claimed to have something which works (a bit) and
> we are waiting for his code.


I have just set up a site about what I am doing.  I go to Munich for
YAPC tomorrow morning so I will not have time to update it much.  See
http://nemo.mongueurs.net.

My concern was more to use the Qt loop so that an embedded perl
interpretor could use the POE framework. So my work is very much
a hack but I now understand pretty much the current state of
windowing in TeXmacs and Qt.

I don't know anything about Window so if you use a Window native
toolkit I can't be of any help. I think that Java and C# are
bad ideas when one is concerned by size of speed.


> 
> >   3) Do you have any sort of architecture\layout documentation as to
> >      the actual workings of your system, or is sifting through the
> >      source code all that exists?
> 
> We do have some documentation in the Help menus, on the Documentation
> page of the texmacs.org and on the Wiki. However, the help is indeed
> *very* unsufficient.
> 
> >   4) Anything else you may have to assist us in this objective.
> 
> Something that I surely plan to do this autumn is separating
> the GUI interface stuff from the rest in a very clean module
> (see the TMGUI api in the address@hidden archives).
> Then is should basically be clear what needs to be reimplemented.

I must read back that stuff in the light of the experience I just got.
My gut feeling is that if TeXmacs could change to use widgets instead
of gadgets, that would facilitate port to other toolkits.

> 
> Of course, there will be also be some other issues when porting
> to Windows, like other file names, possible problems with LaTeX,
> dynamic linking, and pipes. But I think that porting the GUI
> will be the major bottleneck.
> 
> Did you think about which toolkit you want to use for this?
> It would be good if we could reuse your work for a MacOS port too.
> 
> > Anything would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again, and if you would
> > like, I can keep you informed in our progress.
> 
> Thanks you for your help proposal and don't hesitate to ask
> us further questions.
> 
> Best wishes, Joris

--
 stef