Re: editing MathML parts with Amaya

[Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664@yahoo.com>]

Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
 > I'm thinking about editing DocBook XML documents with embedded MathML 
using
 > Emacs and nXML mode.  Alas, MathML is very verbose and therefore not 
easy to
 > edit with a text editor.  So I'd like to edit the MathML parts with an
 > external MathML editor, namely Amaya.  What I want is that if I place 
Emacs'
 > cursor inside a MathML fragment and press a specific key combination, 
the
 > whole MathML part is copied into a file (with some additional heading 
lines),
 > Amaya is run on this file, and if Amaya has finished, the file's content
 > (minus the heading lines) is written back into my Emacs buffer.
 >
 > So far, I've written a script which basically puts standard input in 
a file,
 > invokes Amaya and writes the resulting file content to standard 
output.  If I
 > invoke this from Emacs via shell-command-on-buffer then after finishing
 > Amaya, Emacs crashes with the message: "X protocol error: BadWindow 
(invalid
 > Window parameter) on protocol request 25".
 >
 > In addition, shell-command-on-buffer doesn't seem to be the right thing
 > because it places the command's output in * Shell Command Output * 
instead of
 > replacing the text in the file's buffer.
 >
 > So how do I filter parts of a buffer through a shell command so that the
 > respective part of the buffer is replaced by the command's output?

(shell-command-on-region START END "your-shell-script" (current-buffer) t)

 > Can
 > somebody of you imagine why the above error message appears?  Is there a
 > better way to invoke X clients for editing parts of a document?

Sorry, I don't know.

 > How can I
 > tell Emacs to search for the boundaries of a MathML part the cursor 
is in, so
 > that I don't have to mark the whole MathML fragment before editing it?

(let ((mathml-start (re-search-backward ...))
       (mathml-end (re-search-backward ...)))
   (shell-command-on-region mathml-start mathml-end "your-shell-script"
                            (current-buffer) t))

-- 
Kevin Rodgers