On Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 03:00:05AM +0900, Paul Lutus wrote:
> pierodancona / gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > Why I am asking: TeX's algorithms (paragraph
> > formatting, hyphenation, math formatting etc) are
> > close to optimal, and having them at hand would
> > be much more useful that leaving them buried inside
> > the TeX program (or pdftex).
> 
> Yes, unless the effort required to recreate the TeX algorithms is unduly
> onerous, and unless no sane person would be willing to undertake the task
> of converting the code.
> 
I think you misunderstood what he was saying. I think he wants ruby
bindings to TeX at the level below the TeX syntax (IOW instead of
producing TeX and piping it thru pdftex, link to libtex (I don't think
there is such a thing)). He doesn't want to reimplement TeX in ruby.
> > One simple application 
> > could be to insert beautifully formatted formulas
> > into any document; or, one might play with the
> > basics of TeX and produce a superTeX with more
> > bells and whistles. In any case, every ruby programmer
> > could play wiih TeX and expand or simply use its
> > algorithms.
> 
> In principle, yes, all you say is true -- one could recreate all TeX
> processing in plain Ruby code. But it would probably be very slow, and it
> would be a case of reinventing the wheel.
> 
*reiterates what I said above*
> > Just dreaming,
> 
> Fair enough. Have you considered reducing your idea to practice, by
> recreating the TeX engine in Ruby? It's one think to speculate about such a
> thing, it's quite another to write and test the code.
> 
Again, I don't think this is what he's going for.
> -- 
> Paul Lutus
> http://www.arachnoid.com