Re: [Texmacs-dev] plotting options for TeXmacs

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> > What we really need is an OpenGL plug-in. That would require some work,
> > but it should not be too hard (one month?).
>
> An OpenGL plug-in for TeXmacs? In what sense do you mean this?

The best would be to hard-encode it into the C++ code of TeXmacs,
like I just did for the FreeType library. The idea would be to
provide a few new graphical primitives for rendering 3D objects
and a few typesetting primitives inside TeXmacs to exploit them.
Also, OpenGL has facilities for drawing anti-aliased 2D graphics,
so that is also very cool. I don't know what OpenGL provides for
Postscript output though.

>From the compilation/user point of view, things would again be similar
to FreeType: at compilation time one should have three options:
compile without OpenGL support, compile with OpenGL statically or
dynamically linked (if OpenGL is present on your system), or compile
with "virtual" OpenGL support via dynamically linked libraries.
In the last case, the final binary is not linked with OpenGL at
compile time, but only at run-time and only when it is really used.

> It would be nice to be able to render OpenGL into a TeXmacs document
> via Scheme. There are Mesa bindings for Guile, so this shouldn't be too
> hard.

Yes, but it would even be better on the C/C++ level,
because these are really very low-level graphical primitives,
especially if we want to use OpenGL for 2D graphics too.