Hi Jérôme, Before you go any further on this, please check out: http://texshow.contextgarden.net The backbone of texshow-web is a set of XML files that are already present in the distribution (look for cont-en.xml) Cheers, Taco Jérôme Laurens wrote:
Hi all,
Is is extremely useful for a newbie as I am to have access to the manuals electronically. You just open the pdf and search to obtain what you need.
In general, you end up with a command that you have to copy from the pdf then paste to your source file. Another solution is to use the text editor completion feature, which is available only once you know the correct command name, at least the beginning... What I am missing is a button in the pdf itself that would automagically insert the proper code in my source.
To be more concrete, here is what could be done (on Mac OS X at least).
0 - Define a data model. 1 - For a reasonnable set of commands, define dedicated GUIs panels. 2 - Write a dedicated browser
As there is a huge amount of "reasonnable" TeX and ConTeXt commands, it is -not- reasonnable to fine tune a dedicated GUI for each one. But with some perl I think it would be possible to turn for example the Quick References Manuals into a set of xml files, each one dedicated to its own command. If these files are just HTML forms (modulo the proper style and automagic filter), we have the GUI for free using a web browser. The communication between the browser and the text editor could come from SUBMIT. At least a "copy/paste" phase would be enough.
I already have a custom web browser that can insert some text directly in a text editor (iTeXMac) It is based on Mac OS X WebKit. Which means that I will incorporate this browser directly into iTM, but this not the question so far.
All this makes points 1 and 2 above acceptable IMHO. The problems come from point 0. I think a good thing would be to create a subsection of the context garden, or another wiki, gathering all the sources. The seed would come from the actual documentation with automagic scripts and people would update at will. Then people would be able to work on a local version using a web sucker. We can imagine searching facilities as well
BTW, Sometimes it is necessary to have some output to understand the real effect of a command. This should enter into consideration.
How does it sound?
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