GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2008/11/25 Soren Hauberg <address@hidden>:
> tir, 25 11 2008 kl. 00:51 -0600, skrev Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso:
>> What problem are you solving that generating HTML from TeXinfo isn't solving?
>
> I am indeed using 'makeinfo' to generate the HTML files. The help
> browser is just a simple HTML viewer that is integrated with Octave.

I know that until I have contributed any substantial code myself I
probably don't have a right to form opinions in our meritocracy... but
could I kindly suggest that we focus efforts on a single project
instead of branching forever new individual projects? QtOctave already
has an HTML documentation browser, and I've been spending the past few
days reading about Qt and ptys and jwe's idea[1] of how to properly
implement a GUI so that I can try to fix QtOctave's Terminal widget,
and much of QtOctave, which will probably have to be substantially
changed in order to properly interact with Octave; I still haven't
seen how encapsulated is the Octave interaction. I am a bit dismayed
that there doesn't seem to be a ready-made Qt widget to do what jwe
suggests, although it clearly can be done in Qt, as KDE applications
like Kate or Kdevelop embed a console which interacts with ptys. I am
hoping that I may be able to rip out that KDE code and use it with
QtOctave instead of the current implementation.

There is a problem in that ptys are Unix-specific; our Windows users
might not be able to benefit unless I'm mistaken about this. I am not
personally too concerned about this possible shortcoming myself,
though.

I think John Swenson has already implemented most of the Octave-side
necessities for this idea to work in the octave_server class; is this
correct? I'm trying to unite these efforts into a proper GUI, and I've
got the time and motivation to work on this right now. I don't know if
there's a language barrier with working with QtOctave, as Pedro Lucas
occasionally works in Spanish instead of English (e.g. in the svn
logs), but shouldn't we be concentrating on the GUI that currently
seems to be having the most development?

- Jordi G. H.

[1] http://www.nabble.com/GUI-thoughts-td3172755.html#a3172755