Re: will amaya and ThotEditor converge?

Daniel Veillard (Daniel.Veillard@imag.fr)
Thu, 27 Feb 1997 10:50:01 +0100

NOTE: I suggest more discussion on this topic to be replied only to the
thot-developers mailing-list, thanks...

>I would appreciate some insight about the plans for future development.
>Specifically, are there plans to integrate the functionality offered
>in Amaya back into ThotEditor (fetching/storing documents on the web,
>on the fly conversion of HTML files on input...).

I afraid that there is no such plan, not that is not technically feasible
(shouldn't be too hard) but as explained before, there is nearly zero
task force to improve Thot editor now. The Opera research project has
partly moved to another development base, and the W3C task force works
for Amaya developments.
see http://opera.inrialpes.fr/thot/messages/developers/0005.html
for one of my previous "Call for developers" ...

>If there was an easy mechanism in Thot to import different file formats,
>i could use this to translate to LaTeX or Postscript complete reference
>manuals, using the Thot translation facilities along with "inclusion"
>references:

A generic Import mechanism would probably help a lot ! Unfortunately
it is difficult to design it in a generic way. Designing a generic import
filter mechanism reading unstructured documents and producing a structured
document is clearly not feasible. One has to built a separate filter for
each kind of input document (Except maybe for an SGML import filer which
can stay generic since it's already a structured input). Creating on the
fly document with a program based on the Thot API is not too difficult once
the structure schema for this document type (DTD) is done. Whether an
intermediate level would be really useful is an open question. It all
depends on the time needed to do it. Maybe it would be more "efficient"
to create new import filters or focus on the support of SGML in Thot.

>I can easily build all the tools for "converting" the source files
>and HTML manual. I would however like to use a clean "generic" import
>mechanism, not unlike the excellent "translate" facilities
>available for export. This could have numerous applications like
>handling "natively" SGML documents (given corresponding DTD and schemas),
>structured editing of source code...

Feel free to hack :-), now Thot will evolve at the pace of what external
contributors will provide I'm afraid. However next version will probably
have a Java interpreter embedded with access to the full Thot API. Hence
it will be easier to develop new extension to the Thot editor. Anybody
willing to contribute will be abble to create new functionalities from
small Java scripts without need to recompile the full editor :-) .

Daniel

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