[TxMt] Re: First impressions

[Charilaos Skiadas]

When I meant of logic testing, I did not have exactly that in mind.  
One issue comes up when changing levels to something, which would  
require changing a sub to a sec, changing all labels and refs for it  
etc, doable but just adds to the complication. By logic I meant the  
logic of the program. For instance, where should a "\paragraph" end?  
Imagine this:

\section{my section}

Some text here
\paragraph{a paragraph}
Here is the paragraph. But where does it end?

Is this part of the paragraph? Or only the section?
What if I have some equation:

\[
	\sin(x)
\]

Is this now still the same paragraph?
\section{the next section}



This is one problem. But my biggest problem is anticipating all the  
intricacies of everyone's LaTeX documents. Case in point: You assume  
everyone can use Time Machine, which for instance for me and other  
10.4 people is not the case. In working on the LaTeX bundle,  
especially the bib parser, I encountered dozens of problems with  
custom bib files that I had not anticipated because my bib files  
don't behave like that, hence I was making assumptions about how all  
bib files look like based on how my bib files look like. Similar  
caution would be needed here. A mistake in this case could cause  
problems that might not become apparent until much-much later. It's  
not like some text will be colored with the wrong color. If that  
mistake causes a whole chunk of text in a 400 page document to vanish  
out of sight, or move to a different location, this might not be  
discovered for months. I really wouldn't want to be responsible for  
that. So any such feature, even if it does appear, will come with  
about a dozen warnings.

I do appreciate how useful this would be, and I do miss it quite a  
bit, but it is darned hard to get right for the totality of LaTeX  
documents, which is what I am trying to think of when working on the  
bundle.

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College

On Jan 30, 2008, at 6:55 AM, Jenny Harrison wrote:

> Certainly this would be risky when writing something like a math  
> paper, but outliners all have this feature and are well used and  
> appreciated.  As far as testing goes,  it should not be hard to  
> devise a "logic tester" to flag each time a \ref for a Lemma,  
> Proposition, Theorem, etc.,  occurred before the statement.  That  
> would handle most serious rearrangement errors, the kind of tragic  
> mistake that can occur at 3 am when very sleepy!     Time Machine  
> gives us all decent version control.
>
>
> On 1/30/08, at 3:29 , Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jan 30, 2008, at 6:18 AM, Jenny Harrison wrote:
>>
>>> Yeh, I am still here.  What a dream come true this would be!   I  
>>> don't see how split windows would give a work around for dragging  
>>> and dropping sections.
>>>
>>> -Jenny
>>>
>>>
>>> On 1/30/08, at 2:58 , Jacob Rus wrote:
>>>
>>>> Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
>>>>> Actually what would be even nicer, for me, would be to be able  
>>>>> to get an outline of your whole project, essentially listing  
>>>>> the table of contents, regardless of how many files the project  
>>>>> is split into, and then to be able to simply drag and drop  
>>>>> sections around to rearrange things. But I am probably just  
>>>>> daydreaming.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah.  Jenny (and perhaps others) were talking about this a year  
>>>> ago, but it somehow still hasn't happened.  If someone builds  
>>>> such a thing, I'll gladly buy them a beer. :)
>>
>> Part of the reason it still hasn't happened, apart from my almost  
>> zero free time to invest in TextMate programming for at least the  
>> last 6 months or so, is what seems to me to be the destructiveness  
>> of the whole thing. We are moving vast amounts of text around,  
>> possibly across multiple files, and it seems to me it would be  
>> hard to test whether the right thing happened. This is why I have  
>> been hesitant to do something like that (apart from the other  
>> reasons preventing me from doing it).
>>
>> If everyone was using a version control system on all their tex  
>> files/projects, I might be less worried about it.
>> I envisioned this as an HTML tree of the document, with those  
>> little triangles used for expanding or hiding the subtrees like in  
>> the bundle editor, and then drag and dropping sections around and  
>> tracking the thing via javascript. Should not be too hard once we  
>> have a reliable way to read the whole project in and get the  
>> overall structure figured out correctly and reliably.