Re: Overlay mechanic improvements

[Rasmus]

Hi,

This is a bit OT, sorry.

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> [...]
> It does not work for other image-generating modes like LilyPond-mode.
> I think that something like some Maxima-mode or similar copied an early
> version of preview-latex in order to implement some similar
> functionality.  It's probably fallen victim to bitrot long ago.

Imaxima has a similar functionality.  I don't know if it uses
preview-latex internally.

> preview-latex does an excellent job, but much of its code is not at all
> related to the AUCTeX user interface or the LaTeX input language, and
> yet it will work for nothing but the AUCTeX user interface and the LaTeX
> input language.
 >
> And without generally available facilities to do that sort of work, it
> will remain a singularly useful application without peers.  Because it's
> far too much work to do a peer from scratch for similar needs.  It was
> supposed to make it easier for me to work on my PhD thesis, but I ended
> up doing it _instead_ of my PhD thesis.
>
> The main shortcoming of preview-latex in my book is that it stands out.
> It should be one of possibly many thin applications on top of rendering
> frameworks provided by Emacs proper.

I agree wholeheartedly.  Org has a similar mechanism as well, but it
*sucks* compared to preview-latex.  I tried to get
preview-latex working with Org (which uses LaTeX-syntax for math), but
it was non-trivial.  Thus, I don't interact much with preview-latex
these days, but I have very fond memories of using it.

If you ever decide to allocate time to generalize preview-latex and
have it shipped with Emacs-core I'd happily support that work!

—Rasmus

PS: AUCTeX and preview-latex was what got me into Emacs initially.  At
the time, and probably still, there was no LaTeX editor that was on
par with AUCTeX.

Compiling the newest version of AUCTeX pushed me towards GNU/Linux
(the windows version was .01 behind and it was Really Hardᵀᴹ to
compile it on Windows).

-- 
Need more coffee. . .