Re: Future of display engine and lines

[Alexandre Garreau]

Le vendredi 22 octobre 2021, 00:43:05 CEST Richard Stallman a écrit :
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> Can you design a data structure for it that can represent TeX-style
> formatted output as well as LibreOffice formatting?  Or one that could
> be extended to reach that point?

I really don’t know how LibreOffice formatting works, and LibreOffice looks 
like a pretty complex and inelegant piece of software.  However TeX is a 
general-purpose layout engine and I’m persuaded it’s superior and can 
emulate anything possible with LibreOffice.  I didn’t read know the precise 
C implementation, but afair, having read the TeXbook a long time ago 
(unfortunately since it’s proprietary it’s sometimes hard to find again and 
sometimes esoteric to compile) I know the fundamental elements of TeX 
formatting are hbox (h for horizontal) and vbox (v for vertical), and have 
an important concept of glue (both stretchable and shrinkable, including 
values of various levels of infinity) and depth (distinct from height, to 
determine the baseline).  That would result in a graph, and that’s 
fundamentally different of emacs’ way… which is only a line-divided 
sequence of chars… only a 2D graph.

Where is best documented the graphical engine of Emacs (the C part then), 
because it always made me curious…

> Powerful extensions in what can be displayed would be very important.

I wonder if something as powerful as TeX existed in relation with emacs, 
given its hackability, userbase and momentum (and those of lisp in 
general), emacs could quickly become a fully-fledged browser on par with 
firefox.

I also had a long dream of seeing a hackable-as-emacs TeX-style engine to 
make GUIs, especially as TeX is currently still the state of the art of 
how to make *correct* typography (but suffering of an esoteric, poor and 
hardly known programming language (they have macros, but no real functions 
yet, except in the yet-to-come LaTeX 3)), that would easily become better 
than anything currently made with a browser (which are still considered of 
bad quality compared to TeX or anything from standard DAO (like Scribus)), 
but for GUIs in general.

But that was an idea already existing for instance in the genesis of 
TeXmacs I believe, except it’s less ambitious (just a (actually heavy, 
more than emacs) word processor, not a GUI, IDE, browser, etc. while emacs 
do those).

I’m also afraid it may make emacs slower or heavier…