[texhax] tex source code

[William Adams]

On Jun 26, 2006, at 9:04 PM, David Johnston wrote:

> I was wondering if you could provide some technical support please.  
> I am attempting to write a Latex editor in C#, which will  
> essentially output TeX text to a file, ready for subsequent  
> processing. However, an idea occurred to me to make the whole  
> process a lot simpler. Instead of generating the text, and then  
> processing it, what if the complete TeX processing could be somehow  
> integrated into my program, therefore completely bypassing the  
> entire text parsing problem currently plagued by the TeX process.  
> This would eliminate any need to read the text in from a file,  
> eliminate parsing errors, syntax errors, etc. It would be quicker  
> and more stable.
>
> The idea would be to simply generate a DVI or PDF, or PS output  
> directly from my program. To do this, I would need the source code  
> on how TeX converts the .tex file accordingly, and I would need to  
> further think about how to integrate this into my object-oriented  
> structure I have at the moment. Could you please point me in the  
> right direction, in terms of accessing this source code, so that I  
> could do this please? Also, are there any licensing problems due to  
> this approach?

Interesting idea. There are a couple of things along these lines  
already --- texmacs in particular is quite close to what you're  
describing, and there's something related to Bakoma TeX which is spot  
on.

I think LyX has a much better paradigm though, and you may want to  
check out some recent discussion on creating tex editors on  
comp.text.tex. You may want to look at ANT (ant is not tex) available  
from http://ant.berlios.de/ --- the source for this is in the public  
domain, so no constraints at all.

There shouldn't be any licensing issues, so long as your compleated  
system passes the ``trip'' test (in which case it can be called  
somethingTeXorother) or you don't use ``TeX'' in the name. You'll  
want to get the book _TeX: The Program_ which is the pretty-typeset  
sourcecode for TeX itself.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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