[Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs meeting

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi all,

We plan to organize a TeXmacs meeting nearby Paris from december 8
until december 10 or 11. The main aim of the meeting is to make
rapid technical progress on the Qt interface for TeXmacs and
a native Windows port based on this interface. We have some
funding for people, even abroad, who can help on these topics.
We will also use the opportunity for meeting together
in order to discuss future development policies and
the association Alise we were up to launch last year.

If you are interested by the meeting, then please drop me (Joris)
an email. If you need us to pay train/plane tickets or a hotel room,
then please tell me so. There is money for paying a full trip + stay
for several participants. If many people are interested, then we will
priviledge those who can help fulfilling the above objectives.
Please forward the message to any of your friends or collegues
who are experts on Qt and/or Windows and who might be interested
to come over and help us.

Below follows a list of open issues and other points which you may
wish to look at in order to prepare a successful meeting.

Best wishes, Joris


General
-------
* Please bring your laptops and prepare for compiling Qt-TeXmacs.
* We are especially interested in laptops with different versions of Windows.
  Please take a look at MinGW and try to figure out how to install
  the TeXmacs dependencies (Guile, etc.) in such a way that TeXmacs compiles.
* Other TeXmacs icons?
* A new name for TeXmacs?

Important Qt-related issues
---------------------------
* Debug the Qt port with respect to memory consumption.
* Debug the bad interaction between Guile and Qt which is probably
  responsible for the crash with Qt 4.4 under X11.
* Resolve the issues with the shadow renderer in relation with the
  graphics mode (maybe change the way the mode works: introduce the
  concept of temporary objects like cursors or do explicit caching of
  dirty areas in the graphic mode code).

Completion of Qt-based interface
--------------------------------
* A clean minibuffer to do interaction 'a la Emacs' like in x11.
* Improve and complete all the dialogs (images, directories, ....)
* Still some (not very difficult) unimplemented bits (check TODO):
  set_mouse_pointer, show_wait_indicator, handle quit command in
  texmacs_widget, implement glue_widget (is it used somewhere?).

Other Qt-related issues
-----------------------
* Investigate the possibility of using cairo with the x11 widgets (widkit).
* Investigate the possibility of using the cairo renderer to export
  directly to PDF.
* Under mac it should be possible to do without ghostscript. In
  general: do we really need mandatory ghostscript in the Qt port?
  (convert the existing ps images in some other format svg or png which
  Qt can handle)
* In the renderer the coordinates are explicitly converted between SI
  (internal texmacs integer coords) and graphics api coordinates. In
  modern graphics API however there is the concept of user coordinate
  system so a-priori this explicit conversion is not necessary.
  Investigate feasibility of removing all the calls to encode/decode,
  etc...
* Add markers (maybe a small downward arrow) for the toolbar
  buttons which have submenus?

Windows (and MacOS-X) port(s)
-----------------------------
* Determine a minimal setup for compilation under Windows.
* Determine setup for cross-compilation from Linux or MacOSX to Windows.
* Remove the shell file under mac and win, investigate the possibility
  of use Qt application setting mechanism to replace environment variables.
* How to deal with system() calls portably?
  (apparently this problem was solved in the old win port by Dan Martens,
  who wrote some interface code, look at windows directory on the CVS).
* A clean Xcode project would speed up development and debugging under mac.
  More generally, should we use another configuration/makefile mechanism?