On Monday 01 July 2002 11:15 pm, David Kastrup wrote: > This interplay is currently rather hardwired. I am currently working > on rewiring the logic. Emacs does not really fork itself except for > executing programs. It is not multithreaded. It has a sort of > synchronous multitasking, however, that can call sentinels (when a > separately started executable finishes or gets killed) and filter > routines (when a separately started executable has produces output). > This makes it possible to let separate programs be run more or less > in background as long as they are separate executables.
This is essentially identical to LyX's Forkedcall class. We'd like to extend it to cope with interaction with running processes too, but currently the only code that does this (the spellchecker) has its own hard-wired interaction with the forked process. > Longterm plans are to make the various stages in such a conversion be > submodules, that way making it easier to replace DVI by PDF, or Dvips > and GhostScript with dvipng, and even LaTeX+preview.sty by different > DVI producers (prepping up TeXinfo and Emacs calc with TeX images > would become more feasible). > > > Are we gettting warmer/closer together? > > Well, we probably have similar rendering pipeline functionality to > implement, but we will have a completely different code base for the > pipeline stuff itself. It will take some time until I have that > cooked out well enough and versatile and flexible enough for most > purposes under preview-latex. When it is finished, it might or might > not be interesting for you to take a look at what will then constitute > a method in our pipeline stages, and of course, the actual strings > that get sent to and interpreted from external programs might also be > worth taking (I have already picked out quite a bit from the stuff > that we use and tried to make it apply for your purposes, hopefully > without getting too much of it wrong). In short, I guess you are on > the right track to get things right more or less at first try. I'd > sure like to be as effective as you are. The logic of the two pieces of code is very similar I think. That's why we've progressed as quickly as we have on this side. We're just using your knowledge base in true parasitic fashion. It looks to me that of the three preview-latex modules * preview.sty * dvipng * preview.el the first two are usable directly by LyX and the logic of the controller, preview.el, is similar to that that's now in LyX (I base that on your description of how it works). So there is every chance for us to grow together. You never know, you might be able to use some of LyX's logic to your own advantage. Regards, Angus
