Re: [Texmacs-dev] Roadmap porting TeXmacs and the TMGUI API

[Stéphane Payrard]

Yes, this is congruent with my plans that are:

 -shallow Qt    : Uses the Qt main loop and the TeXmacs gadgets toolkit. 
 -medium  Qt    : Uses the Qt main loop, Qt widgets and a shallow port of the 
tm_editor widget
 -(deep) Qt     : Uses the Qt main loop, Qt widgets and a  proper port of the 
tm_editor widget

 -shallow Perl : Implies shallow Qt, so as to have Qt main
                  loop. Embedded Perl interpretor reads
                  .texmacs/startup.pl at start.  The tm_widget API is
                  accessible from Perl. I am writing POE::mQt so one can
                  write POE code that calls Perl or Guile handlers.
                  Guile is in control of the startup and of the GUILE
                  handlers.

 -medium  Perl  : TM_EXT_LANGS environment variable which interpreters are
                  supported.
                  The first interpeter has most control. 
                  If this is Perl:
                  tm_widget is scripted in Perl. Perl is able to interpret
                  the Guile startup scripts. Hopefully they are not to
                  fancy. More detail will follow. Not there yet.

 -deep   Perl   : Perl has deeper access to TeXmacs

A combination of compilation flags and startup options will allow
to choose what one wants when we will have implemented more than
one combination.

I have discovered that QtApplication can run without any Qt window so
the unanticipated introduction of shallow Qt in my plans. Medium Qt is
still dependant on a QXtWidget doing what I expect it to do.

My goal is to complete  shallow Qt and shallow Perl
as soon as possible. This combination will be already so powerful that
I will put up a site called nemo.mongueurs.net 
dedicated to the combination of
     TeXmacs + Qt event loop + POE
with full details as soon this combination works. 
The goal is to interest the Perl crowd to TeXmacs.
But real acceptance can come only if I get to medium TeXmacs
so that people will be able to use TeXmacs without Guile
knowledge.

The site is already there but empty.

Probably, the first example will be to use the
POE::Component::Client::HTTP to pull web pages while updating the
status line. Currently we use curl or whatever and we don't get any
feedback about the loading of a page.  BTW: this means that the
tm_widget interface is public.

I am curious to know how we we can display in TeXmacs stuff-as-we-load
it. How can we do it without exposing too much API.  In fact modern
HTML browsers act as if they had already seen closing HTML tags.  For
example they display as much of a table they have already seen.

BTW: Do we have a table implementation that can
handle HTML tables? For example: I am unable to justify text
in table cells. Is it possible?


See http://poe.perl.org for a inkling about what the shallow QT+Perl
can buy us.



--
  stef