[Texmacs-dev] DRDs, converters, LaTeX

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi,

In the upcoming release 1.0.1.13, I included a first example of
how one may use DRDs in relation to converters. The current DRD
is a direct translation of the old "latex_commands" file,
so it has to be improved in the future (for instance by adding
information about the packages which are needed for each command).
Nevertheless, it should give an idea of how things should work.

Unfortunately, Guile is a *very bad* Scheme implementation,
so the use of DRDs is slow. This is counterbalanced by the fact
that they DRDs are inherintly lazy, but nevertheless...
Fortunately, this is still acceptable for conversion purposes,
but a rethinking might be necessary before we generalize the use
of DRDs to other purposes.

It should be noticed that DRDs are mainly meant to provide
logical information about data formats, so one has to be careful
what to put in them, and what not. For instance, the TeXmacs
translations of LaTeX tags should not be put in the DRD,
but in the converters. On the other hand, one might want to put
many of the macro definitions currently in tmtex-preamble.scm
in a "TeXmacs extensions to LaTeX" DRD.

I also constructed support for the automatic detection of
LaTeX packages which are needed by certain commands in
the LaTeX output converter. If Nix has time, then he could
try to complete that and move part of the tables in
tmtex-preamble.scm to the DRD. I have not had time yet to deal
with the question of initial environments, but the convertion
routines (now in Data/Convert) have been reorganized in such
a way that this may soon be added. The soon being not that soon,
because I have to do some non-TeXmacs stuff this month.
I also did not yet study the gluiing bug in $a$$b$ and
a^{b}^{c}-like constructs.

Best wishes, Joris