Re: address@hidden: Where to ask for Info features?]

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     a) a popup help text displayed when over the image
> 
> That is probably feasible with tooltips, but what would it be used for?
> 
>     b) the text to be used for cut&paste of the image
> 
> Why would we want that?  It would seem more natural for cutting and
> pasting to copy the image, right?

The application I have in mind is a help text presenting various LaTeX
constructs in their typeset form (as one example, it could be a buffer
full of mathematical symbols).  If you cut and pasted such symbols
from a TeXinfo buffer into a LaTeX source buffer, you would want to
have the respective source code pasted, whether or not the image
property is left on during the process (it would not survive
revisiting the buffer, however).

Anyhow: in Emacs images are either overlays (in which case it is
impossible to copy them anyway) or text properties.  While there is
the special case of empty overlays also, in general an image covers
an underlying text.  If you cut&paste an image into some buffer
related to a file, saving the file will just save the underlying
text.  And if the images are supposed to illustrate the look of some
symbol like \sum, it would be nice if the pasted text looked like
this also.

If we need to have a text to place the image display property on
anyway, it would be nice if the actual used text would be under the
control of the Texinfo author.  It might also be considered like the
"ALT" tag in html: text to be written in case that the image can't be
loaded or the info reader is incapable of displaying images.  In
fact, since info can be converted into HTML, and HTML can also be
displayed by text browsers like Lynx, we really want to have a useful
"ALT" text instead of the image.

In a similar vein, being able to tack a tooltip on might come handy
for giving additional information about some image.  For tooltips
maybe a more generally applicable interface could be useful that would
allow them to be placed on text as well.

Right now, in the application I am thinking of (a LaTeX help system
written in Texinfo), I'd mostly need them on images, and I would
probably have the tooltip identical to the cut&paste text.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum