RE: Lout gui

[mzukowski]

I've got some ideas about how to make Lout interactive, even on page 99 of a
document, by using tools which make memory transactional so you can save and
restore checkpointed memory images.  Have you considered using Display
PostScript (or Display GhostScript) for display issues?  This would be a
perfect fit for Lout, of course, since it already generates PostScript.

The main idea would be to run through the document and checkpointing at
various points like every few paragraphs or so--this would be tweakable (how
long to restore a checkpoint v. how long to process this part of the
document).  Keep track of which checkpoints produced which page.  To
re-render a paragraph jump to the checkpoint in the stream just ahead of
that paragraph and then shove the new lout code through until that page gets
emitted.  It's almost random-access.  Lout seems optimized for low-memory
usage, so I would expect the size of a checkpoint file to stay relatively
constant, no matter how far into the document you are.

Then I would do a simple diff of the DPS output to what is on the screen so
that only things that have changed would need to be re-rendered, if that is
a performance issue.

Monty

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Kellett [SMTP:address@hidden
> Sent: Monday, May 17, 1999 4:43 AM
> To:   Lout
> Subject:      Lout gui
> 
> To anyone interested,
> 
> I'm just about to start a nearly-WYSIWYG editor for lout, i'll be putting
> it
> under GPL (what is lout's license?). If anybody has started such a 
> project or heard of the starting of one then could they reply with info 
> of the project?. I become interested in writing a gui on seeing LyX, and 
> a lot of my ideas for the project will be based on LyX / Micro$oft Word.
> The central idea being a style system as advanced as LyX but with the 
> ease of use of Word, and a greatly improved diag/eq editing system.
> 
> If anybody has any ideas or would like to aid the project (later on in 
> development - I would prefer to keep it closed until sep '99) then I 
> would be gratefull for any response.
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Alex Kellett
>