Improving the current implementation

[Should be completed]

1.Memory management

If I have the courage, I might one day write a garbage collector for TeXmacs.

2.Graphical interface

We wish to move towards Guile-Gtk or another portable graphical user interface. Now that we have found someone for making a Windows port, this not an urgent issue anymore though.

3.Encodings and fonts

• Systematically use Unicode.
• Some changes have still to be made in the way font encodings are handled. This should make it easier to maintain fonts with characters from several physical fonts, virtual fonts, special characters, etc.
• Currently, the current logical font is determined from a fixed set of environment variables only. The current typesetting font should rather be a tree (instead of a string), which is evaluated (so that environment variables are replaced) and then passed to find_font(display,tree). The current font can then be a joined font and future fonts might depend on user environment variables (i.e. colored fonts, using more than one color).

4.Speed

In order to speed up the program, we already made the major change that not the whole document is typeset again when making local changes. However, several other main optimizations should still be made:

• Indexing file names which are in the distribution. This may accelerate booting the program.
• Encode the system environment variables; this will globally accelerate the program. Also, intermediate data during the typesetting process might be encoded in a more binary way.
• The typesetter should be made lazy in a more fundamental way.

5.Scheme

The Guile/Scheme interface should become more robust and well documented. Several things still need to be done for this:

• Implement a system for “contextual overloading”.
• Better preservation of locality.
• Systematic use of closures throughout the code.
• A clean interface for manipulating TeXmacs content (a unified interface for both internal TeXmacs trees and the associated Scheme representation).
• Documentation.