Re: [Texmacs-dev] Visual appearance of page breaks

[Alvaro Tejero Cantero]

Norbert Nemec wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> working with TeXmacs to prepare a presentation, I realize how little feeling I 
> get from TeXmacs about the "page-layout" (which is, of course, extremely 
> important for a presentation) 

I have a feeling that I don't understand what people do in order to 
prepare a presentation with TeXmacs.

Don't you use a switch environment?

I find that highly advisable, but someone has still to write a 
"linearize" function that puts one switch after the other for printing, 
pdf export, etc.

I think most of the problem comes from the fact
> that page breaks are only indicated by a thin gray line, instead of 
> displaying something that really feels like separate pages. I believe the 
> whole feeling for pages could be much improved by really cutting the pages 
> apart, maybe even giving each one a black border and a tiny shadow effect 
> (having the "paper" float above the gray background.

I don't personally like the 3D effect and are very happy with the 
current subtle separation, although if it's valuable to somebody 
wouldn't mind a thicker line.

> Furthermore, it would really be nice to have the pages displayed in two or 
> more columns. For documents with many pages you really need some way to gain 
> an overview, and such a page-layout view would help a lot in this respect, I 
> believe.

That would be a good feature, but it would involve a lot of typesetting 
also. Meanwhile, as a temporary hack you could do it through the 
preview option, by setting in edit->preferences

psnup -2  $TEXMACS_HOME_PATH/system/tmp/preview.ps |ggv -  2&<

(-2 for 2-page in one page and so on).

I have very little knowledge of redirections and this line I came up 
with looks very bad to me. Perhaps the best would be if one could point 
to the file parameter, say $file and thus write

psnup -2 $file | ggv -

At this point, given that I can already preview documents very well 
with TeXmacs itself I don't see the point of the preview option if it's 
not to set fancy filtering options such as this one.

HTH,

 'Alvaro.