Re: wysiwig TeX in dia

[James Michael DuPont <mdupont777 yahoo com>]

> Oh, I see. You want to turn a core full of the
> assumption that it owns the
> diagram and all its subcomponents, into a core
> paranoid about
> externally-triggered changes. 
Yes. A listener for update messages on watched
objects.
A model - view - controller, where the model is
distributed. The views controllers are connected via a
data backbone.

> This looks like every
> possible thing but a
> trivial undertaking in my book (about like
> transforming a simple diagramming
> tool into a CAD package, probably...).
Yes it is not trivial. But DIA is a real good starting
point. We shoul not be afraid to try. 

> I can see good reasons for implementing what you
> describe, but it's
> definitely not a "simple Perl::DBD hack job". 
It is more complex you are right. Not easy, and we
need a concept first.

> IMO, a
> much more efficient and
> generally useful thing to do would be to extend CVS
> so that instead of using
> diff/patch/vi on XML files, it would perform the
> equivalent xml-aware
> operations (ie, diff on a pair of XML trees rather
> than diff on a pair of
> gzipped files; an XML patch which would be able to
> locate a specific node in
> a potentially slightly different tree, and would
> apply the change; and an
> XML "conflict resolver tool" which would take the
> "tree-with-conflicts" left
> by the XML patch and allow the user to graphically
> resolve the thing.
Yes, I aggree. We should also use tools that exist.
See : 
http://www.logilab.org/xmldiff/
http://diffxml.sourceforge.net/
http://www.xmldb.org/index.html
XUpdate http://www.xmldb.org/xupdate/
"The mission of the XUpdate Working Group is to
provide open and flexible update facilities to modify
data in XML documents. Doing so it is not important
where the documents come from. It can be real
documents or virtual documents retrieved from XML
databases. "
 
Now for the display, Dia should be able to take an
XPATH expression via a GOTO command and display the
object in question. 

That will come done to keeping the XML document 
that is normally outputted just as a Text file
instanciated in memory and X-ref-ed to the memory
structures in the DIA.


DIA OBJECT -->points to---> XML Representation in
memory --> points back to --> DIA Object

The XML object can be updated and queried with effects
on the DIA object, and vice versa. Both are just
different views and encodings on the same abstract
data.

What do you think?

mike



=====
James Michael DuPont

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