From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: Re: x-symbol?
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:06:30 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87ocf377xl.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 87pqzka40a.fsf@padme.localdomain
m_mommer@yahoo.com (Mario S. Mommer) writes:
> One of the things I use emacs for is writing LaTeX documents, and
> besides auctex and reftex, there is one package that is very important
> and useful to me: x-symbol. The bad news is that the package has been
> orphaned some while ago, and is suffering from bitrot. This is really
> unfortunate, because x-symbol has two features that I have not found
> anywhere else: an input method based on shortcuts and modifiers for
> quite a few latex symbols, and optic sugar for many symbols, so that
> e.g. \alpha appear as the greek letter alpha on screen. For some reason,
> I find these two features really help a lot.
>
> My questions are:
>
> - does anyone have a version of x-symbol that runs on emacs 23 and is
> willing to share it here?
>
> - Does anyone know of an alternative?
With regard to the optic sugar, you might \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
in connection with some utf-8 special characters, namely let LaTeX cater
for the conversion.
For the input methods of x-symbol, I have no good substitution to
suggest. It would be a good thing if somebody bothered porting them
over into AUCTeX. That would require copyright assignments of both
porter and the original X-Symbol author (likely sympathetic to the
endeavor) to have this accepted there.
For the visual component, I consider X-Symbol's approach a bit too
invasive on the buffer text: if things go wrong, you lose original
input. preview-latex's own way of inserting graphics instead, however,
appears like overkill for the same application space. A middle ground
would be the use of display properties substituting appropriate Unicode
characters, but not graphics.
The work still has to be done, but once it _has_ been done, chances are
that it will at least be guarded somewhat against bitrot.
--
David Kastrup
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2010-06-22 9:06 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-06-21 13:50 x-symbol? Mario S. Mommer
2010-06-22 8:36 ` x-symbol? Eric S Fraga
2010-06-23 8:00 ` x-symbol? Mario S. Mommer
2010-06-22 9:06 ` David Kastrup [this message]
2010-06-23 7:49 ` x-symbol? Mario S. Mommer
2010-06-23 12:10 ` x-symbol? David Kastrup
[not found] ` <87bpb3idsr.fsf@fh-trier.de>
2010-06-23 7:54 ` x-symbol? Mario S. Mommer
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