[Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs source prerequisites

[Salman Khilji]

I'd like to know what should be considered as prerequisites before a developer 
tries to understand/maintain/modify/enhance TeXmacs.  I am talking about the 
kind of developer that has at least some sort of understanding about every 
asepct of TeXmacs and could possible say port TeXmacs to using Qt or GTK 
library.  Or perhaps I am talking about Joris---everything that he had to 
learn before he started the project.  

Basically I want a list that one could give to a programmer and tell him "Hey, 
go and learn all this stuff before you handle TeXmacs).

So obviously, you need to know C++.  So that would be prerequisite # 1.

As a newbie to TeXmacs I haven't played with customizaing TeXmacs with Scheme.  
However I believe that if you really don't want to dig into customization and 
scripting issues, you could get away with only C++ and not Scheme....am I 
correct?

According to TeXmacs WiKi "TeXmacs dependancy on TeX is limited to fonts, font 
rendering and BibTeX".  Considering that I have never done "font rendering", 
I would consider this as a prerequisite.  I studied:

http://freetype.sourceforge.net/freetype2/docs/glyphs/index.html

I went thru the above link to gain an understanding of what kinda of issues 
are involved in font rendering.  So is there any documentation that I could 
read that explains TeX fonts in detail?  FreeType does not seem to address 
TeX fonts.  Where is the screen font rendering code in the source?  I'd like 
to go through it and see how such beautiful rendering is implemented.


Again, from TeXmacs Wiki, "MetaPost was a pain to implement (Joris' words)".  
Having not ever used MetaPost in the past, I got from the homepage that 
MetaPost is some sort of graphics language.  To me it seems like MetaPost is 
implemented in TeXmacs (although I don't see anywhere it could have been used 
since TeXmacs does not do graphics).  So is MetaPost a prerequisite.


Would anybody like to recommend a set of links and references that I can 
consult to gain a better understanding of the theory behind the design of 
TeXmacs.

Salman