> (not really a Maxima discussion any more...)
True. Feel free to drop the ML if you want to ...
> > You can define pages of arbitrary size. But I guess most pdf readers
> > will run out of memory when rendering it. (I don't know if there are
> > renderers clever enough to only render the visible part of the page.)
>
> Really? I thought all vector-to-pixel engines worked hard to make
> viewing windows work well. Are PDF readers using a more primitive
> renderer than Display Postscript?
Actually my experience is solely with ghostscript and its various
frontends (which handles both postscript and pdf) and with xpdf.
Both seem to render full pages at once: There is a delay when
opening a new large page but there is no delay scrolling within
the page.
I don't know about xdvi. It renders too fast to show any delays
on my computer, but I recall that it renders embedded postscipt
(i.e. plots) on demand.
I think postscript/pdf renderers usually can't do much better
than assuming viewing window = page, because postscript is
a full programming language and allows you to do rather
nice/nasty things.
> But surely there is a dynamic
> renderer for TeX by now, which handles window resizing etc.
> gracefully? Or is TeX still married to paper?
I think there is a TeX renderer for emacs, but I have never used
it myself. Perhaps it only does single math formulae ...
I'm not sure if you want TeX for anything else than paper. TeX
is designed to do one thing well: Put glyphs onto pages. It is
flexible enough to allow you to build a markup language on top
of it - like texinfo - and it has a convenient syntax to type
math.
One could write a new parser for the TeX syntax, but it won't
be TeX, it won't be compatible without being stuck to paper.
Perhaps you now say: "This is not a problem. Who knows all this
fancy things about TeX anyway? All we need is the syntax, which
is handy and well known." But you would lose most add-on packages
to TeX that way. I think TeX is still alive only because it had time
to accumulate extra packages for several decades.
Perhaps TeX will die together with paper...
Harald