Re: ECB for LaTeX?

[Eric Ludlam <eludlam@mathworks.com>]

>>> Klaus Berndl <klaus.berndl@sdm.de> seems to think that:
>>  
>> > I have decided to go the latter approach because then ECB is independent
>> > from speedbar internals and if these are changed....
>>  
>>  yes... ?  if these are changed...what ?  You mean you'd rather not benefit
>>  from the enhancements brought by those changes ?  I don't understand.
>
>The other side... ECB can only display tokens in its method-buffer if the
>tokens are semantic-token, i.h. they must offer the semantic-API to get the
>informations to display. speedbar on the other side has well working and well
>tested code to use imenu and etags to parse files. But then speedbar displays
>these imenu and etags tokens in it's own proprietary display engine.
>
>Conclusion: ECB uses the speedbar code for generating imenu- and etags tokens
>but then ECB has to transform these tokens itself into the semantic-format.
>
>Now if Eric changes the internal format of the tokens speedbar gets with imenu
>and etags and if ECB uses this internal code then probably the
>ECB-transformation-engine (transforming to semantic-format) will be broken.
>
>Is this more understandable?
>
>But maybe Eric could extract the imenu and etags code from speedbar, put on
>top a well defined API and make it therefore less internal...then ECB can
>completely be based on this code.

The mechanism speedbar uses for gathering tags to display is not
secret or internal.  It is documented (perhaps no too well) and public
so that it is easy to write new tag generators.

If you start with `speedbar-dynamic-tags-function-list', you will see
some doc on how to add more taggers that sb-texinfo uses this to
create a new custom tag generator for hierarchical tag list as opposed
to the flat sorted list created by imenu.

The only problem is that when you add to the list, you also provide a
function that will display those tags in speedbar, but most always use
`speedbar-insert-generic-list' which is a pretty simple translator.
Only the semantic speedbar support does something special, and ECB
already has that one covered. ;)

Eric