A couple of emacs lisp questions

[Daniel Dalton]

Hi,

I'm a vision impaired student, and I use LaTeX to typeset my
Mathematics. 

I'm working on a project called latex-access, porting it to emacs. I've
got two problems so far:
1. I need to make 5 or 6 key bindings. I presume the way to do this is
to create a prefix and then put my bindings under this. So perhaps the
prefix could be c-c c-l and then I can create key bindings to trigger
certain functions i.e.e c-c c-l t toggles the functionality on/off.
How would I implement something like this?
How could I record the current key bindings which use c-c c-l as a
prefix, and then restore them upon exit of the latex-access
stuff. I.e. when it is disabled.
Note, that I haven't created a minor or major mode, I'm just using hooks
and advice as well as interactive functions to make my work available
under emacs. 

2. I display various symbols on the echo area, which represent the
current line of the buffer in Braille. Well, actually, it's slightly
more complicated than this, I can display as many as I want i.e. if I
want to translate three lines above the current line as well as the
current line, the echo area will be four lines tall. I'm just using the
message function. The translation in the echo area must be on screen at
all times, i.e. it's not a splash message, and is updated when
post-command hook is triggered. However, this is blocking important
emacs messages that should be visible in the echo area. My idea was to
create some kind of minibuffer or window at the bottom of screen so I
wouldn't interrupt the echo area. I would like the window to shrink/grow
depending on how many lines I need to display. What would the best way
of doing this be? Could anyone point me to some documentation that could
help me with introducing such a feature?

BTW, if it helps at all, the project I'm working on is at:
http://latex-access.sourceforge.net/

Thanks very much for any help,

Daniel Dalton