Re: [AUCTeX-devel] more x-symbol features?

[Tassilo Horn]

Uwe Brauer <address@hidden> writes:

>    Tassilo> Glad we have that now. Then I'll do the region/section stuff
>    Tassilo> ASAP, Mosè does the Index suggestion, and then we can have a
>    Tassilo> new shiny release (after a bit of testing)! I think we have
>    Tassilo> accumulated more than enough additions, fixes, and new
>    Tassilo> features to think about that.
>
> First of all thanks for implementing one of the most important features
> of x-symbol-mode in native auctex, since now a switch to GNU emacs is
> much easier for me.
>
> I would like however to suggest two more features which I find
> interesting. Maybe they should be included in the wishlist or maybe the
> second one can be easily implemented?
>
> X-symbol-mode has three essential features. For me the most important ones 
> are:
>
>     -  display of constructs \integral by symbols, together with sub and
>        super indices . This feature is now implemented for GNU emacs
>        using  the pretty-symbol-mode.
>        Xemacs is left out, but this is xemacs fault and anyhow  in
>        Xemacs x-symbol-mode works, still.[1]
>
>     -  display of \includegraphics{fig.png} including pdf jpg (I think).
>        I know I could use latex-preview for that. But on a large file I
>        find it less convenient  to use preview-latex. GNU emacs displays
>        as far as know, png, jpg and pdf internally. So the question is
>        whether a (minor-mode) could be cooked up to deal with such latex
>        constructs.
>        Maybe this is already be implemented and I am just ignorant of
>        this GNU Emacs feature.

You normally don't include png files when you care about the quality of
your output.  So usually, the graphic files are EPS or PDF.  Ok, these
could be converted to PNG in order to show them inline.  But a harder
problem is that you don't need to (and usually don't) specify the path
and file extension with \includegraphics but you can set that with
\graphicspath and \DeclareGraphicsExtensions which are all _lists_.  So
we'd need to implement the very same search algorithm as the graphicx
package in order to show the right image.  Well, and we would need to
implement all the rotate, scale, viewport, and whatnot options.

That's too much work given that preview already solves that just fine.
And I'm not in favour of implementing a half-way solution which kinda
works in the simple cases and fails as soon as some options or configs
are involved.

>     -  cleaning of ASCII 7bits constructs by 8bit[2] chars. Take for
>        example the «letter» à. As far as I know this can be generated in
>        TeX by \`a or {\`a} or \`{a} etc etc. Although in 2015 almost
>        every editor I know should display 8bit chars, I still receive
>        documents constaining such constructs of my colleagues. Now
>        x-symbol-mode does two things:
>
>         -  it converts all these constructs to (internally) à[3]
>
>         -  and then save them either 8bit/UTF8 or
>         -  as 7bit \`a 

Mark the region, `M-x iso-tex2iso RET', done!

Bye,
Tassilo