Re: [Texmacs-dev] Generic Latex plugin

[Alvaro Tejero Cantero]

Hello!

This is very welcome. Now, more than ever, you can tell the typical
(La)TeX user that TeXmacs embraces/supersedes/&c. their previous
toolset, since e.g. all fancy graphical tex-based utilities can be used
inside a session.

However I can still think of one really necessary feature for
graphics-oriented sessions. This would be to have a postscript-like tag
that swallows as arguments 

(A) the type of session that is going to produce the graphics and 
(B) the actual code that produces it. When unevaluated it would look
like this (screenshot attached):

<postscript|gsession://latex/xypic
           |\xymatrix{bla bla bla actual code\\
            more & code }
           | usual arguments
           | ...
           >

one of the possible "gsessions" could be raw postscript itself, another
gnuplot, yet another PyX... anything that responds by sending back
postscript code.

Something of theis sort would be extremely valuable in order to keep the
figures and the code generating them in sync. This would ease a lot
document management.

It could work like the new facility to evaluate single mathematical
expressions out of a session. Perhaps it could be also implemented with
a switch-like structure. I agree that the source should be watched in
order to maintain synchronization, and that file naming issues might
arise. A possible compromise would be the following:

 - if the user enters a filename for the thing, then this acts as cached
version of the figure until an "Update figures" command is issued.

 - if he doesn't, the figure is generated each time the document is
loaded or the tag evaluated, and given a temporary filename (maybe based
in a hash of the code that generates it).

What do you think? 
                

'Alvaro

PS. Bas, yur tm-gentex.sh didn't make it through some mail filtering
systems that discard executable extensions. Maybe if you want we can put
it in a http server, or just copy it inline in the message.

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