On Tuesday 14 May 2002 2:20 pm, David Kastrup wrote: > Angus Leeming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > On Tuesday 14 May 2002 1:47 pm, David Kastrup wrote: > > > Angus Leeming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > On Tuesday 14 May 2002 12:47 pm, Andre Poenitz wrote: > > > > > We don't have proper multithreading, but some of the graphics stuff > > > > > is (was?) rendered asynchronously already. > > > > > > > > We have a forkedcalls class that executes a fork-ed process and emits > > > > a signal when that process finishes. I think that it'd be perfect for > > > > the requirements you describe. And yes, it is used by the graphics > > > > code. > > > > > > Somewhat more would be required for feeding the GhostScript process. > > > Here is an pseudoextract from a fake session: > > > > What you describe is conceptually similar to spellchecking and we > > can spellcheck in LyX ;-) (I mean that we're communicating > > interactively with an external program, ispell or gs.) > > > > LyX's spellchecker code communicates with ispell via pipes. How do you > > communicate with gs? > > Pipes. So it seems like all of the technical infrastructure necessary > to let LyX manage the data flow for generating inline previews as well > as preview-latex does would already be present. Uh, wait: it should > support fast display of bitmap files in a format that GhostScript can > produce. But I would guess this would not prove really much of an > issue?
Well LyX is getting better at graphics. It can display almost any graphics file you throw at it, either by loading the file direct or by converting it to a loadable format and loading that temp file. All graphics loading and rendering is asynchronous, so slowness doesn't block the user. You may have heard that one of the immediate goals that we have set ourselves is to support multiple GUI toolkits cleanly. We currently use the xforms library to load graphics files. Its image loading routines do not (currently) load PNG files, so we'd have to follow the (slow) conversion route. (Xforms can load, directly and quickly, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNM, TIF, XBM, XPM bitmap formats). Fortunately xforms is now LGPL-ed and modifiable, so native loading of PNG is an achievable target. Moreover, one of the main goals of 1.3 is to finish the Qt port; that would use Qt's image loading routines which I understand are pretty good. So yes, it looks like progress is possible. > Just hope that not too many _users_ are reading the developer lists, > or they may come banging at your doors asking you to do what appears > doable after all... They waited 18 months for 1.2. They're going to like what they see which should give us some time before thay start screaming for more ;-) Angus
