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plain TeX users and ConTeXt users should not have to feel left out. While ConTeXt is not supported yet by released versions of AUCTeX, at least supporting plain would help people, and be a start for ConTeXt as well. There are plain-based formats like MusiXTeX that could benefit a lot from preview-latex. The main part of the difficulties here is to adapt preview.dtx to produce stuff not requiring LaTeX.
Currently you can’t have both a footnote (which gets displayed as just its footnote number) and math inside of a footnote rendered as an image: such nesting might be achieved by rerunning preview-latex on the footnote contents when one opens the footnote for editing.
Macros like ‘\textit’ can be rendered as images, but the resulting humungous blob is not suitable for editing, in particular since the line filling from LaTeX does not coincide with that of Emacs. It would be much more useful if text properties just switched the relevant font to italics rather than replacing the whole text with an image. It would also make editing quite easier. Then there are things like footnotes that are currently just replaced by their footnote number. While editing is not a concern here (the number is not in the original text, anyway), it would save a lot of conversion time if no images were generated, but Emacs just displayed a properly fontified version of the footnote number. Also, this might make preview-latex useful even on text terminals.
Probably in connection with adding appropriate support to
dvipng, it would be nice if clicking on an image from a larger
piece of source code would place the cursor at the respective source
code location.
It is a bit embarrassing that preview.dtx is written in a manner that will not give either good syntax highlighting or good indentation when employing AUCTeX.
Currently, preview-latex’s web page is not structured at all. Better navigation would be desirable, as well as separate News and Errata eye catchers.
This will be of interest for the HTML and TeX renditions of the texinfo manual. Since Texinfo now supports images as well, this could well be nice to have.
Various stuff appears several times.
The current gs.el interface is fundamentally flawed, not only because of a broken implementation. A general batchable and daemonizable rendering infrastructure that can work on all kinds of preview images for embedding into buffers is warranted. The current implementation has a rather adhoc flavor and is not easily extended. It will not work outside of AUCTeX, either.
When referencing to equations and the like, the preview-images of the source rather than plain text should be displayed. If the preview in question covers labels, those should appear in the bubble help and/or a context menu. Apropos:
Previews on erroneous LaTeX passages might gain a red border or similar.
A lot of errors are of the "badly configured" variety. Perhaps the relevant info pages should be delivered in addition to the error message.
Both the LaTeX run under Emacs control as well as actual image insertion in Emacs could be faster. CVS Emacs has improved in that respect, but it still is slower than desirable.
The general image and color handling in Emacs is inefficient and partly defective. This is still the case in CVS. One option would be to replace the whole color and image handling with GDK routines when this library is available, since it has been optimized for it.
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