[cl-typesetting-devel] Couple of silly questions

[C Y]

--- Marc Battyani <marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com> wrote:

> > I've got a copy of TeX - The Program on order so maybe I
> > could use that to get some ideas.
> 
> Well in theory cl-typesetting is much more powerful than TeX.
> In practice TeX as a huge collections of libraries and
> packages. The "macro" language of cl-typesetting is Common
> Lisp ;-)

Hehe.  A good point.  
 
> > > A lot of people said they will implement front-ends
> > > like this but to far AFAIK only Klaus Weidner and
> > > Peter Seibel have done so.
> >
> > Which ones did they implement?
> 
> Klaus wrote the XHTML renderer in the contrib directory.
> Peter wrote a small syntax to write his book:
> http://www.gigamonkeys.com/lisp/markup/

Nifty.  I guess duplicating a TeX and LaTeX parser would be a bit of a
challenge ;-).  Maybe it could be done incrementally...

> > Can cl-typesetting do that kind of "localized" rendering?
> 
> Yes, I do it all the time. For instance in tables, each cell
> contain an instance of a cl-typesetting engine.

How resource intensive is a "pass" over a small typesetting expression?

> > The main problem is that until the math editing environment
> > is addressed there isn't much point in doing anything else
> > GUI wise, since everything else is so trivial compared to
> > that problem.  :-/
> 
> I have started some math functions in cl-typesetting. But it's
> not finished yet.

I'm hoping the STIX fonts will be out soon - that should make for a
VERY interesting tool.

I'm curious to see how Knuth handled mathematical typesetting -
certainly his solutions seem to be the most effective to date.

> BTW with cl-typesetting you get the position of each character
> so in a notebook interface you can easily detect where a user
> has clicked for instance.

Nice.  So something like (say) Garnet recording a mouse click and
screen coordinates could be sent to a routine which knew the limits of
the document on the screen, and translated those screen coordinates to
document coordinates and use those coordinates to return a document
object?  That could be VERY handy.  And perhaps I could teach the
typesetting to output Garnet lisp objects using the typesetter
dimensions directly, which could then be executed to update the
notebook... drool...  and the best part is that outputting accurate PDF
documents (or, given the proper implemented routines) even high quality
TeX document exporting would be almost trivial.

OK, I'm interested :-).

Cheers,
CY




		
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