On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Ahmed Fasih<wuzzyv...@gmail.com> wrote: > > This seems a good enough time to ask: I'd like to use Notebook where > instead of using FCKEditor to typeset inter-cell rich text, one could > type latex in-browser. A latex2html converter would then operate on > those HTML cells. This way, one could imagine writing an entire thesis > or book chapter in Notebook, with the relevant cells right in it, and > export it to html or pdf (as in literate programming). To make it > appropriate for journal articles, it would need to omit the cells and > outputs. > > Given that I can typeset Latex in the code cells themselves, this is > probably not too distant but will probably percolate in my head for a > few years, so if anyone has any inclination to go down this route, I'd > love to hear about it.
I had an inclination in this direction today when I was doing some number theory research. I was developing an algorithm, partly doing experiments in the notebook, and tracking all my progress in an emacs latex document, ocassionally copying and pasting from the "Text" view of a worksheet to verbatim blocks in emacs. For me, it would have been very useful if the following were possible: 1. There were text cells between the compute cells, but their contents were 100% latex, and stayed that way. Compute cells would be exactly as is. 2. A process running in the background would latex a version of the contents of my worksheet that would get written to disk regularly as a 100% valid latex document. It would have all the compute cells nicely typeset in verbatim blocks (or something nicer), and everything between compute cells would 100% be copied into this latex document. 3. I Preview program would run showing the nicely typeset form of the latex document. 4. The possibility to also directly edit the latex document, and have the Sage notebook server notice this and refresh the worksheet based on those edits. This would make it easy to do big reorganize of the document, search and replace throughout, a complicated emacs macro somewhere, etc. With 1-4 above, I could typeset 100% correctly absolutely any latex document with no funny business, but would have Sage I/O nicely integrated in the document. I could chose to ignore the pdf preview, or look at it when I want to. The above would actually be fairly easy to implement, IMHO. This would only be something that works on your own local desktop of course. Note that this still has the old fashioned non WYSIWYG "write the doc in one model, view typeset version in another" model. But I really like having total control over my latex documents, with all my standard macros, bibtex, etc., and this would make that possible, while still embedding a complete sage worksheet session. One issue that is not treated above is that a worksheet is typically a lot shorter than a latex document, for me. For example, in what I was doing earlier today the latex document was 32 typeset pages long. It would thus also be very nice to easily be able to link multiple worksheets together (maybe via ordered folders and cross references between worksheets). Anyway, I'm guessing part of the point of this discussion is that some people see that the Sage notebook could have an additional broader role as a different kind of Latex editing environment (different than say Lyx or Texmacs or Emacs). Regarding Texmacs, that is an odd program -- some people hate it and some people really love it. You can usually tell which you will be within a few minutes. Note that what I describe above is *hugely* different than either Texmacs or Lyx, in that one would have 100% control and be able to edit any latex document however you want. It would be more like maybe TexShop on the Mac or WinEdt on Windows, or maybe Kyle on Linux (I've used all three of TexShop, WinEdt, and Kyle a lot, by the way). -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
