[Texmacs-dev] Re: Hello

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi,

> Hi, my name is Dan Martens.  I am a 4th year computer science\software
> engineering student at the University Of Western Ontario in London,
> Ontario Canada. For our final project\thesis to obtain our degree, our
> (my group and I) mission is to port texmacs to the Windows 9x\2k
> platform as desired in your contributions page.  If possible, I was
> wondering if you could perhaps answer a few questions for me.  

This is a great project, and we are indeed very interested by this.

>   1) Do you currently have anyone else attempting this?

We have started experimenting and discussing how to do this.
Please take a look at the archives of the address@hidden
mailing list. For further discussions, it would be good to suscribe
to this list.

>   2) Have you attempted this in the past? 
>      If so, what were the main problems in porting?

No, I have never really tried.
Stéphane Payrard has recently started to port TeXmacs to Qt.
He just claimed to have something which works (a bit) and
we are waiting for his code.

>   3) Do you have any sort of architecture\layout documentation as to
>      the actual workings of your system, or is sifting through the
>      source code all that exists?

We do have some documentation in the Help menus, on the Documentation
page of the texmacs.org and on the Wiki. However, the help is indeed
*very* unsufficient.

>   4) Anything else you may have to assist us in this objective.

Something that I surely plan to do this autumn is separating
the GUI interface stuff from the rest in a very clean module
(see the TMGUI api in the address@hidden archives).
Then is should basically be clear what needs to be reimplemented.

Of course, there will be also be some other issues when porting
to Windows, like other file names, possible problems with LaTeX,
dynamic linking, and pipes. But I think that porting the GUI
will be the major bottleneck.

Did you think about which toolkit you want to use for this?
It would be good if we could reuse your work for a MacOS port too.

> Anything would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again, and if you would
> like, I can keep you informed in our progress.

Thanks you for your help proposal and don't hesitate to ask
us further questions.

Best wishes, Joris


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Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>
http://www.texmacs.org: GNU TeXmacs scientific text editor
http://www.math.u-psud.fr/~vdhoeven: personal homepage
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