Xmaxima interface, was: Maxima 5.10.0 release candidate 3

On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 08:34 -0600, Robert Dodier wrote:
> On 9/4/06, Jaime E. Villate <villate at gnu.org> wrote:
> > There are some other Tk browsers more recent/complete than tkHTML.
> > My favorite one is MTE (http://wiki.tcl.tk/15025)
> > I've been studying its code for a while and I think it would not
> > be too hard to incorporate it into Xmaxima for 5.9.11.
> 
> > If we stick to Firefox, rather than allowing any html browser, we could
> > distribute a javascript extension to Firefox to parse the extra <eval>
> > and <result> tags. I do not know how much work that would require.
> 
> All of this sounds interesting. If you have the time to investigate
> further, I would be interested to know what you find out.
I'll keep you posted.

> I believe what would be of greatest interest in Xmaxima is
> to improve the worksheet interface (in which text and Maxima
> stuff is mixed). I know TeXmacs does that also, but it has its
> own problems, so I think the question is still open.

> If nothing else, it would be really nice if Xmaxima could save
> the current worksheet (including the markup tags) to a file.
> There is a "Save to file" menu option but it only saves the
> rendered text.
Xmaxima converts HTML into text and puts it into a "text widget"
where you can modify it and save it. It also tags parts of the
text in the widget to be able to do something with it; for instance,
the text from "eval" tags. You end up with an original html
file, and a modified text from the widget text. You do not
have a modified html content to save.

I think it will not be very difficult to tag all of the text, each
part with the name of the HTML tag where it came from. That way
you can actually edit and save the underlying html file. That is
what the MTE editor does, and that is another strong point in
favor of improving Xmaxima's browser, rather than using Firefox.

I will start working on that, and some other features we have
discussed, in the next weeks. If anybody is interesting in Tcl/Tk
programming (it is not hard to start learning it), I could use
some help. David May seems to have good knowledge of the subject.
Perhaps he might want to join our development team? Mario has
also expressed some interest in learning Tcl/Tk.

Regards,
Jaime