[Texmacs-dev] Re: Hello

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Sat, 14 Sep 2002, Dan Martens wrote:

> Latex has a windows distribution, so I'm hoping that end of things
> won't be a problem.

At most little problems in any case.

> The GUI will definetly be the worst part.  This of
> course depends on the architecture in which the widgets you are using
> now (I haven't looked at the code yet....:)) are written.

The GUI is already quite modular and it certainly has been designed
in such a way that it should not be *too* hard to port it.
Nevertheless, things grow and grow, and some cleaning up
is necessary now.

> If the widgets
> are message based (like windows), then there shouldn't be a huge problem
> hopefully.

They are message based, but maybe not exactly in the same way.

> Windows does not have windowing packages like Linux, so I
> will have to rewrite the GUI based on Win32 API calls.

Not sure. You might want to use Qt or Gtk.
Qt has a high quality documentation and Windows port.
However, the Windows version is not free and even costs $1500.

> The only other
> alternative to this would be a Java implementation of this.  That would
> solve most of your porting problems, it would be a big rewrite, but you
> would then have a Mac\Win\Posix version.  The only downside to this
> is....how fast does it have to be.

I am afraid that this would indeed slow things down too much.
In that case, why not use cygwin?

> If you have anything that requires
> serious speed in Texmacs, then I wouldn't suggest that.

TeXmacs really needs speed, so I indeed would not suggest Java.

> Let me know which approach you see as being the correct one, as you know
> much much much more about your system than I do :)

I think that you should take a look at the classical multi-platform
developement tools for Linux/Windows/MacOS first, like Qt, Gtk,
WxWindows and GNUstep.

> We just undertook this project yesterday, so we have quite a lot to learn 
> here.

That's fine; we are glad to assist you with this important job.

Best wishes, Joris