Re: x-symbol?

[David Kastrup]

m_mommer@yahoo.com (Mario S. Mommer) writes:

> One of the things I use emacs for is writing LaTeX documents, and
> besides auctex and reftex, there is one package that is very important
> and useful to me: x-symbol. The bad news is that the package has been
> orphaned some while ago, and is suffering from bitrot. This is really
> unfortunate, because x-symbol has two features that I have not found
> anywhere else: an input method based on shortcuts and modifiers for
> quite a few latex symbols, and optic sugar for many symbols, so that
> e.g. \alpha appear as the greek letter alpha on screen. For some reason,
> I find these two features really help a lot.
>
> My questions are:
>
>  - does anyone have a version of x-symbol that runs on emacs 23 and is
>    willing to share it here?
>
>  - Does anyone know of an alternative?

With regard to the optic sugar, you might \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
in connection with some utf-8 special characters, namely let LaTeX cater
for the conversion.

For the input methods of x-symbol, I have no good substitution to
suggest.  It would be a good thing if somebody bothered porting them
over into AUCTeX.  That would require copyright assignments of both
porter and the original X-Symbol author (likely sympathetic to the
endeavor) to have this accepted there.

For the visual component, I consider X-Symbol's approach a bit too
invasive on the buffer text: if things go wrong, you lose original
input.  preview-latex's own way of inserting graphics instead, however,
appears like overkill for the same application space.  A middle ground
would be the use of display properties substituting appropriate Unicode
characters, but not graphics.

The work still has to be done, but once it _has_ been done, chances are
that it will at least be guarded somewhat against bitrot.

-- 
David Kastrup