Re: Overlay mechanic improvements

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Rasmus <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 12:35:08 +0200
> 
> > 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!

Feel free to expand on the problem(s) you hint on, because just by
reading this exchange, I don't really understand what kind of
facilities are missing in the core.  (I don't use preview-latex and
probably never will.)