Re: Making texshow easier to edit

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

Patrick Gundlach wrote:
> Hello Nikolai,
> 
> [a luckily not so long list snipped]
> 
> I'll have a look at texshow-web this weekend.

...

> So if there are more suggestions, shout out now.

Are you sure that you wanted to ask that?

# source browser
(apart from line numbering and advanced searching mentioned last time)
- It probably doesn't make much difference, but the search could be case
insensitive.
- There are also quite some files with "sorry, I don't know how to
display the file" message. They should either become supported, removed
(we don't really need /fonts/type1/hoekwater/context/contnav.pfb for
example) or there should be a link to download them
- a link to download could actually be present for every file
(especially if old ConTeXt distros also land in the source browser)
- a link to download documentation (pdf or png with html navigation) for
single .tex files could be present (like in modules.pdf)
- it would be nice to add plain.tex
- it would be nice to add third-party modules' sources
- both goes for texshow as well

This is probably not trivial, but doable:
Every command is either a TeX primitive or defined somewhere (including
\let-s and probably some other strange TeX stuff I'm not yet aware of).
Suppose there is someone like me with very modest knowledge of all those
commands, but wants to understand what that strange macro definition is
doing. If there exists a short description of some command in texshow, a
label could be added to any such command appearing anywhere in any .tex
file and a hyperlink to either texshow or \def\thatcommand.

If, for every new version of ConTeXt, a script would check for all the
available new commands (\def\command), exclude the ones which are of no
interest for an user (\dododododocommand ...), and somehow compare that
with translations and texshow (quite some manual work would be needed
anyway), than we would have a nice list of commands that:
- have to be added to texshow
- have to be translated if they were not already
(including the modules).

# live.ConTeXt
- Has anyone thought about enabling the source browser and "live" on
older ConTeXt distributions? I'm not sure if this brings anything and is
also not on the priority list, but perhaps someone will be interested in
the development of ConTeXt or some strange behaviour/bugs can be
checked/compared in two different versions ...

# texshow
Joining (and extending) the functionality of texshow and Wiki is
probably the most urgent and the least trivial task. (None of the things
I mentioned above are so relevant if relevant at all.)

Mojca

(PS: Tell me if you need some extra books to read once you are done with
your fontinstaller and the garden :)