Re: [Texmacs-dev] Windows port of TeXmacs

[David Allouche]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 10:29:57AM -0500, Bill Page wrote:

> Does anyone here on the TeXmacs list have any experience with libw11
> and/or win32-x11? Would either of these simplify porting TeXmacs to
> Windows?

Good question. Some people seem interested in working on the win32
port, but I have not yet seen any concrete work on that issue.

It seems that the chosen solution is:

  short term (now) -- usability on Cygwin system, I plan to iron out the
      installation problems by extending the configure script.

  medium term (6-12 monthes) -- porting to a native Win32 GUI after
      Joris has defined the TMGUI API. The toolkit has not yet been
      officially chosen. Qt has problematic licensing, GTK has no
      native look and feel and MFC seems to be a pain to work with.
      wxWindows has my personal preference but it may lack some
      required features.

> Note: Apparently guile 1.4 is available in a Windows/MinGW version.
> What else might be needed?

I did not know of MinGW. Maybe that would be helpful since it seems to
allows to produce windows binaries with g++. Having c++ code
compatible between g++ and VC++ (pronounce toilets-plus-plus) would be
a major problem.

Currently, the major dependences are:

  guile -- since TeXmacs is very loosely coupled to its scheme
      subsystem, it might be possible to switch to an alternative
      implementation if using guile on win32 is too problematic.

  Joris seems to consider implementing his own Scheme a possibility, I
  would rather try alternative third party software (bigloo,
  plt-scheme?). But since such a transition would be very risky, it
  should only be considered as a last resort.

  METAFONT and BibTeX -- that should not be a problem since there
      already exist native implementations of the LaTeX system on
      Win32.

  ghostscript -- used to display images in documents using a nested X
      window. Exists in native win32 version. Using it on Win32 might
      require tighter integration since the nested X window approach
      is not portable. The closest thing is Win32 world is using
      ActiveX controls, but I do not know if GhostScript supports
      that.

  graphic converters -- TeXmacs relies on numerous external tools to
      convert images to PostScript. These scripts are found in the
      following packages:

        tiff2ps: libtiff
        pdf2ps: ghostscript
        pnmtops, giftopnm, ppmtogif, xpmtoppm: netpbm

     I ignore what is the status of libtiff and netpbm for native
     win32.

     ImageMagic exists in native Win32 version. Maybe we might use its
     library abilities to handle the graphic conversions an get away
     with the gostscript dependence. If going on using GhostScript is
     not a problem, we might simply use ImageMagic command line tools
     for conversion.

  wget -- used to retrieve files on the internet. Exists in native
      win32 version. No problem there.


Some time ago I suggested we might hack something around
XFree86/Cygwin for the main window and a native lib for menus and
other windows, but someone reminded me that mixing GUI systems was
generally not feasible and always very difficult. So I no longer
consider that an option.

Well... I think that is a good summary of the current situation. I am
going to put this on my website for further reference.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.