Making texshow easier to edit

Making texshow easier to edit

[Nikolai Weibull]

The following things would make editing the texshow wiki a lot easier to
edit:

* Preview displays of changes
* Easy cross-referencing between commands
* Not putting everything inside <pre>...</pre> tags

When making changes, having a preview display makes it easier to decide
on what works and what doesn't before "commiting".

I added documentation to the \quote command and thought that having
links to \setupquote and \setuplanguage would be helpful.  I had to
create <a href>-type tags for this with long-winded query-strings.  It
would be much easier to have some automatic cross-referencing going on
(a la WikiWords perhaps, but using \ as a signal?).

When everything is put inside <pre>...</pre> tags, line-breaks become
significant, which makes it very hard to tell where to break a line.  It
would be much better if the browser could decide this for itself.

Anyway, I think that texshow is a great utility and hopefully more
commands will be described and commented upon.  For me to continue doing
this, I'd probably have to have the above features available before I
did so,
        nikolai

-- 
Nikolai Weibull: now available free of charge at http://bitwi.se/!
Born in Chicago, IL USA; currently residing in Gothenburg, Sweden.
main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}

Re: Making texshow easier to edit

[Patrick Gundlach]

Hello Nikolai,

[a luckily not so long list snipped]

I'll have a look at texshow-web this weekend. Thank you for your
suggestion, I will report back to you and Mojca. There is also (at
least) one feature reqest from Taco, so I won't get bored soon. So if
there are more suggestions, shout out now. 

Patick

Re: Re: Making texshow easier to edit

[Nikolai Weibull]

Patrick Gundlach wrote:

> [a luckily not so long list snipped]
> 
> I'll have a look at texshow-web this weekend. Thank you for your
> suggestion, I will report back to you and Mojca. There is also (at
> least) one feature reqest from Taco, so I won't get bored soon. So if
> there are more suggestions, shout out now. 

Great!  I hope I didn't come of as negative to texshow or its
implementation.  I like it, but I would also like to see it become
better and easier to use/edit.  Thank you for your work so far,
        nikolai

-- 
Nikolai Weibull: now available free of charge at http://bitwi.se/!
Born in Chicago, IL USA; currently residing in Gothenburg, Sweden.
main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}

Re: Making texshow easier to edit

[Mojca Miklavec]

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 :)

Re: Making texshow easier to edit

[luigi.scarso]

Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> - a link to download documentation (pdf or png with html navigation) for
> single .tex files could be present (like in modules.pdf)
>
Actually, modules.pdf  is an old  version.
I'm making a new modules.pdf; news at
http://contextgarden.net/User:Luigi.scarso/modules.pdf
(actually useless link: maybe next week...)

some alpha software (was: Re: Making texshow easier to edit)

[Patrick Gundlach]

Dear all,

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

I don't think that I am ever done with these two. :) Since we are
talking about the font installer:

I have created a project at foundry.supelec.fr, thanks to Fabrice
Popineau. (I keep him busy with the software there :) 

I have uploaded some files into the subversion server, as well added
something that could be called the beginning of a documentation.
Beware! This is pre pre alpha software and I am very busy changing the
interface every few hours, so contact me before you actually try to
work with it. I hope that there will be nightly subversion snapshots
to download soon.

Here is the project page: https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/rfil/

and here is the 'home page' of the project:
https://rfil.groups.foundry.supelec.fr/ (documentation in rdoc format)

Happy TeXing and happy hacking,

Patrick
-- 
ConTeXt wiki and more: http://contextgarden.net

Re: some beta software (fontinstaller)

[Patrick Gundlach]

Hello again,

finally a follow-up. I have been working on my font installer for the
last few (insert your favourite time period here). It has come to a
state where it is actually usable. Although not very fancy yet. 

For those who don't know: it is a set of ruby libraries to create a
font installer as well as some example installers. It can handle a
single font (like afm2tfm) and a font family (like fontinst). 

Included in the distribution is a program called afm2tfm.rb. You might
guess that this is meant as a replacement for afm2tfm (comes with
dvips). It can do a bit more than afm2tfm, for example, it can also
handle truetype fonts and keep kerning and ligature information in the
tfm file.

Another program included is 'rfont', a simple installer for font
families (regular, bold, italic, ...). But for that program, I need
some help for implementing ConTeXt font support. LaTeX support is
already working (although very preliminary - I'd appreciate help
there, too).

Prerequisites:

* ruby 1.8  (I guess, I have not tested it with 1.6)
* pltotf, vptovf (come with your TeX distribution)
* ttf2afm (pdftex), if you want to install truetype fonts
* patience (not everything is bug free)
* subversion if you want to stay up to date and can't wait a few hours
  for the nightly snapshot.

This release is dedicated to Mojca and Nikolai (who have to wait for
the changes in texshow-web - I was just too busy with this)

> Here is the project page: https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/rfil/
>
> and here is the 'home page' of the project:
> https://rfil.groups.foundry.supelec.fr/ (documentation in rdoc format)

There is also a mailinglist at that site. You can find it at the
project page.

Because the upload of the foundry server is not working for me at the
moment, I have put the current cvs snapshot at
<http://levana.de/tmp/rfil-104.tgz>. This will go away soon. You can
always downoad the nightly svn snapshot.


Any kind of feedback is welcome.

Patrick
-- 
ConTeXt wiki and more: http://contextgarden.net

Re: Re: some beta software (fontinstaller)

[Hans Hagen]

Patrick Gundlach wrote:

>Any kind of feedback is welcome.
>  
>
great. looks like adam and i have to start rethinking texfont now -) 

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Re: some beta software (fontinstaller)

[Patrick Gundlach]

>
>>Any kind of feedback is welcome.
>>  
>>
> great. looks like adam and i have to start rethinking texfont now -) 

Not so fast: the lib cannot handle opentype fonts yet. And it will
take some thinking to integrate them smoothly (I'd expect).


Patrick

(Just implemented an afm writer - don't know if anybody will ever use
it)
-- 
ConTeXt wiki and more: http://contextgarden.net