Re: [Texmacs-dev] Some interesting contributions that volunteers mightmake

[Dan Martens]

> 1) Developing an instant messenging plug-in for TeXmacs.
>    This could evoluate into a collaborative authoring tool.
>    This should be easy using the new concept of mutator tags.
>    See Help -> Interfacing -> Mutator tags for details.

Are you talking about creating a propriatary system for texmacs messaging or
leveraging the existing systems such as ICQ,MSN etc...? There are probably
ways to interface with AMSN and LICQ under linux.

> 2) Port TeXmacs to a PDA with Linux. You will probably need
>    >= 32Mb of RAM and a >= 100MHz processor. But I do think
>    this to be a reasonable project. It no longer depends on
>    TEX/LaTeX, since we may use FreeType for the fonts.

Last year, myself and a couple other developers developed a calendar
application under the Sharp Zaurus which runs QTopia.  This is to my
knowledge, the most popular Linux based PDA out there, with the exception of
possibly the IPAQ to Linux project.
The Zaurus had 32MB flash and 32MB RAM (of which 16MB was reserved for OS),
and with our experience, you could not reliably allocate much more than 4MB
of memory without crashing the system.  This may be a problem for texmacs,
especially with large documents.
  The other issues that we found to be annoying was of course the lack of
screen real estate and very slow CPU speeds.
  Another thing, especially if you want to port to the Zaurus, is that it
utilizes QTopia, which means TeXmacs must be re-written in QT.  As I recall,
this was considered but not seriously attempted a while ago (back when I was
deciding how to write the windows port).
  The other option here is running the windows port on WinCE.  WinCE does
implement most of the Win32 API which means that the windows port would
likely compile and run on it (barring any resource or memory problems).

Dan
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