Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: presentation mode bugs

[Stéphane Payrard]

On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 05:31:36PM +0200, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 29 May 2002, Stéphane Payrard wrote:
> 
> > Also I would like to have some level of compliance of the TBD TeXmacs
> > widget with the Gtk 2.0 Text API as an incitation for people to use
> > the TeXmacs widget. This API is at last (and probably at least) as
> > powerful than the Tk text API I like very much and has been around for
> > many many years.
> 
> By the way, did you consider Qt instead of Gtk?
> The last six months, each time I talk about porting TeXmacs to Windows,
> people recommend me to use Qt instead of Gtk. I don't have anything
> against one or the other, but it might be worth noticing this feedback...
> 

First I forgot to say that presentation mode was a good idea. I got
sick so I will work the fix this evening and tomorrow.

For KDE, too bad you did not tell it sooner, I thought that as a GNU
project it was politically correct to use Gnome.  Too bad, I did not ask
explicitely. Anyway, to benefit form the Linux effect, we should use
either Gnome or KDE.  The problem is that both enters a new major
version with lack of language bindings.

There are no perl binding perl for KDE2 or KDE3.  Apparently there was
a wealth of tools for perl and gtk but I found them half-baked or
unsuitable to our goals or too difficult too adapt. Also, I was
interested by the perl support for glade. But there is many gotchas,
the big one is that these tools do not yet support  Gtk 2.0. Someone is
due but no one knows when because the programmer is too busy.

I am using KDE as desktop, I find it better than Gnome.  As a programmer
I now have experience with Gtk instead og Qt.

I would not be against a port to Qt.  But I have read too many docs,
tried to many tools and it is time to setup and do something concrete
to kick up my moral.  I got some experience in the process with Gtk
and with the Perl internals and I have now feel of what I can do with
them.  Also I got to discuss in many IRC channels and know where and
from who I can get help.

I have a bias: for my own purposes, I want to use TeXmacs as a mere
widget on some toolkit and use it from perl. Another motivation for
perl is the presence of a real event framework in Perl called POE wich
is currently lacking from TeXmacs. POE can hook to the event-loop of
any toolkit.

Currently I am learning to "parse" the Gtk 2.0 headers to generate
perl bindings only for the widgets necessary for TeXmacs + the Gtk
Multiline Text Framework. Also I may be interested to built an API
that looks more like the Perl::Tk that has trapped most of the perl
communauty which hardly use Gtk.

What I am trying to do is already too ambitious for my modest abilities,
so i am against to consider immediately a cross-language solution
(using SWIG) and another GUI toolkit. It may be time to do it once
I will have learnt when completing this first iteration.

--
  stef