From: rda@eng.cam.ac.uk (R.D. Auchterlounie) Subject: Re: A Word Processor for Linux Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1993 18:08:49 GMT
warmerda@pci.on.ca (Frank Warmerdam) writes:
>In article <1993Aug6.052152.25033@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> pn002b@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Peter C. Norton) writes:
>>In <1993Aug5.234522.4237@medicus.com> billf@medicus.com (Bill Foote) writes:
[...]
>>doing this, but is seems plausible. Spawn Emacs in X. Have Emacs spawn
>>xdvi. Keep it suspended.As someone works, depending on the terminal,
>>as they underline, bold, or italicize, have WP-like outlining and
>>underlining appear. In an alternate buffer, all codes would be inserted
>>and whenever you want to look at your document, a keystroke would
>>bring the xdvi session into the foreground, and you could view your
>>document. Anyone from MIT or CMU out there? :).
[...]
>>Has anyone tried this? Or anything like this? It seems like an elementry
>>process... Of course, I'm probably wrong :(
maybe not, read on...
>>
>>Please, answer, as I'm (obviously) interested in this idea?
>The IntuiTeX project is intended to do something similar to this. The key
[...details deleted...]
Note: 'TeXtures', on Macs, already has a continuous update mode that sounds
very like this.
ObGNUdisclaimer: I don't actually use macs but I know people who do :)
Actually it's quite easy to get _close_ to this functionality with
current xdvi - it will redraw from the DVI file on a keypress ('R' ?)
or a refresh, even if the file has changed on disk. So you need a
small program to either send it a keypress using XSendEvent, or send
it an event to force it to refresh it's window (the latter can be done
with a short shell function/script).
I wrote some additions to Emacs LaTeX-mode a while back which
implemented this - problem was, it was slow if the file was large
(not nearly as slow as starting xdvi from scratch though), and these
were old workstations where _everything_ was slow anyway.
The idea I ended up with was to semi-permanently mark a region of the
document which you could stuff through LaTeX (using TeX-region) and to
xdvi with one keypress.
Worked quite nicely for equations and things - where you need to know
that all your fancy commands are doing something useful. The refresh
method worked only if the window was raised - so hiding it was an easy
way to turn off updating.
It's a while since I looked at this as I'm now using AUCTeX in Emacs,
and working on DOS boxes :( - if anyone's interested, mail me and
I'll try and dig it up.
-ray
<rda@eng.cam.ac.uk>