On 7/29/07, David Chisnall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I've just finished writing a book and a thesis using LaTeX, and so I
> think I am now in a good position to evaluate the system, and suggest
> ideas we should steal and ideas we should abandon.
>
> _The Good_
>
> There are a few really nice things about LaTeX. The first is that
> it's easy to type. Commands are of the form \foo{wibble}, which is a
> lot easier than something like <foo>wibble</foo>, for example. If
> we're considering using something a bit more advanced than a plain
> text editor, this isn't a problem for the format, it's a problem for
> the UI. I haven't seen a word processor that lets you enter markup
> information faster than I can enter LaTeX markup in vim (particularly
> since I have written a 'do what I mean' script for the more verbose
> parts).
>
> The real advantages of something like LaTeX are the clear separation
> of presentation and content, and the ability to use semantic markup.
> When I am writing a long document, I am concerned with the
> structure. I don't care how it will look, because everything will
> all get re-flowed as I write more, and having it all dancing around
> is just distracting. I want to say 'this is a code listing in C,'
> 'this is a section heading' etc, and worry about how the appear later.
>
> Finally, LaTeX produces really gorgeous output. Something like Word,
> which tries to make ligatures of really strange combinations of
> letters, just looks hideous in comparison. The OS X text system is
> not far off, so GNUstep has the potential to give us similar quality
> if I poke my SoC student hard enough.
>
> _The Not-So-Good_
>
> LaTeX is built on TeX. I don't actually use LaTeX, I use LaTeX plus
> a load of packages, plus a load of my own additions. This presents
> real problems for a text editor. Consider the following two snippets:
>
> \code{foo += bar}
>
> \codefile[caption={A short listing}]{examples/short.c}
>
> In these two snippets, the arguments to the first should be spell-
> checked according to the rules for C (i.e. spell check strings and
> comments, nothing else). In the second, the value associated with
> the caption key should be spell checked, but nothing else.
> Unfortunately, an editor has no way of knowing which of these
> arguments are commands and which are displayed text. Something like
> aspell knows about some basic LaTeX commands, and will spell check
> those correctly. Everything else is guesswork. Since TeX is Turing-
> complete, the only way of knowing this for certain is to execute the
> program and see if it outputs the text. TeX has the same limitation
> as PostScript in this respect; the only way of executing page 100 is
> to execute pages 0-99 and discard he result. Even on a Core 2 Duo,
> it takes a good ten to thirty seconds to typeset a decent length
> document, which is prohibitively expensive for an interactive process
> such as a spell-check-as-you-type feature.
>
> The other disadvantage of this approach is that it's easy to turn
> LaTeX into PDF, but very hard to go the other way. Even with
> pdfsync, clicking on the PDF will only take you within a paragraph or
> two of the markup that generated a word.
>
> I said earlier that there was a clean separation between semantic
> markup and presentation code, but this isn't really enforced. TeX
> doesn't do it, LaTeX tries to. In my own documents, I write using
> semantic markup and then define commands elsewhere that describe how
> to display these, but it requires some effort and discipline to
> maintain this proper level of abstraction.
>
> _The Ugly_
>
> TeX. TeX is a really hideous language. Writing TeX feels like
> writing assembly code for a '70s stack-based 8-bit architecture.
> Some ideas from this era died an untimely death, but this was one
> that deserved to be staked, decapitated, had a communion wafer placed
> in its mouth and buried under a crossroads to ensure it never arose
> again. Any time you need to go below the surface of LaTeX, you are
> in TeX-land, and cursing the lack of anything that even looks a bit
> like a high-level language.
>
> _What We Can Do Better_
>
> The first thing to remove is the in-band signalling that UNIX-users
> love so much. Because TeX is plain text containing markup, you need
> to insert all of the formatting commands into the text. We can avoid
> this by placing them in the NSDictionary provided by NSAttributedString.
>
> Doing this also allows us to completely separate markup and
> transformations. We should define some basic keys (e.g. heading
> depth), and users could add others if they wanted. We then define
> bundles which perform the transform from the set of semantic tags to
> a set of syntactic ones (we can include things like pulling in code
> from a file and performing syntax highlighting on it as more complex
> examples).
>
> Since we have this nice abstraction, our editor can work much more
> closely with the structure of the document. We can switch directly
> between different view (semantic / presentation) and have something
> like an outline view for the structure while maintaining things like
> references as links.
>
> There are probably some other things. Comments? Suggestions?
> Ramblings? Flames?
What I don't understand is you are talking
about the user interface of a text editor
or the internal text storage of a text editor ?
For GNUstep application, such text is probably stored as NSTextStorage,
which is a NSAttributedString already.
The question is how do you present such attributed string to users.
Rich text editor present attributed string as rendered text (bold, color, etc)
while LaTex-like editor present the attributes as tag.
If we don't want to have tag along with text,
then we need a pane which shows current attributes of selected text,
which is not that convenient.
I think the reason having tag along with text (LaTex, HTML)
is because people don't want to have a separate window for the attributes.
They can tolerate some extra tag in text to avoid keep turning head
to look another window.
So I guess the questions is actually how do you want to present
the attributes to users and which tag system you like to use.
Yen-Ju
>
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