bug#44842: 28.0.50; Support texed latex as Calc language

[Michael Heerdegen]

Hello,

Roland, Mattias, if you can help, Stefan CC'd for information since I
had discussed this with him on emacs-help:

I want to enable Calc latex language mode to support latexed output as
an image.  Can someone please help me to prepare an according patch?

Here is my prove of concept so far, working for me in a master emacs -Q:

calc-latex.el
Description: application/emacs-lisp

I'm using the latex "breqn" package because it allows me to use the line
breaks that Calc adds to the output by itself; that looks very good most
of the time, is even a bit aware of the window width, and doesn't make
latex barf when line breaks appear inside paren expressions (as it does
normally).  I don't know if I can assume that every latex installation
has "breqn" installed.  Without something like "breqn" the results were
not satisfactory in my experiments, I found that solution after a long
with trouble.

Then, for subformula editing etc., we probably want to provide a way to
turn the image into the source output and back.

And: how should this feature be enabled?  Should it be provided as a
separate language?  The one dimension we have for the prefix arg of d L
is already completely exhausted.

Anything else I forgot to consider?  I guess it would be nice to get rid
of all or most of the org dependencies.  Oh, and I didn't mention yet
that this is super cool and thus has a high priority to have ;-)

Regards,

Michael.


In GNU Emacs 28.0.50 (build 5, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.23, cairo 
version 1.16.0)
 of 2020-11-24 built on drachen
Repository revision: 9a574a6e51d669eaff091ab590fb18733a386d2c
Repository branch: master
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12008000
System Description: Debian GNU/Linux bullseye/sid