Re: ECB for LaTeX?

[Klaus Berndl]

On Mon, 26 May 2003, Kai Großjohann wrote:



>  kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann) writes:
>  
> > I'm wondering if ECB would be of any help for composing LaTeX
> > documents.  Opinions?
>  
>  I've learned that ECB can integrate the speedbar.  That's nice.  But
>  I think I prefer to have the directories and the methods for the
>  current file in different windows.
>  
>  So is there a way to get that?

Not currently but with the next version. The next forthcoming version of ECB
has two new features:

1. Integrating speedbar not only as replacement for the directories buffer
   (like in latest production release 1.93) but possibility to display
   speedbar in any of the special windows of ECB. So you can use the default
   directories buffer of ECB plus the speedbar as replacement of the default
   methods-token-buffer of ECB ==> You display directoires and methods/tokens
   in different windows.

2. Builtin (i.e. without speedbar) parsing and displaying methods/tokens of
   file-types not supported by semantic but supported be imenu and etags ==>
   Displaying contents of TaTeX, TeX, perl etc. etc. in the ECB-methods
   buffer.

Most of the code is already in CVS but ont 100% ready for production release.

>  
>  Maybe ECB could use imenu if it doesn't know how to parse the current
>  buffer.

See above...

>  
>  Or maybe even RefTeX?  That would be cool because RefTeX shows me the
>  table of contents of the whole document, instead of just the current
>  file.  (Did I say I didn't want the methods in the same window as the
>  files?  Oh, err, hm, uh...)

Currently there are no plans to display RefTeX contents in the native
ECB-methods-buffer. But maybe the original reftex-buffer can be integrated in
an ECB-layout. The layout engine of ECB is so flexible to integrate arbitrary
buffers into an layout and offers also a framework to update/synch such
buffers with current displayed sources of the edit-buffer of ECB. But this
depends also somehow on the package which should be integrated. many packages
brings their own display-engine which does all the window-management ==> these
packages can be integrated into ECB only very hard if even possible.... I do
not know internals of reftex but if reftex offers to use its contents buffer
so it can be displayed in any dedicated window and if reftex offers to switch
off the reftex-builtin window-management (displaying and hiding the
reftex-window) it should not to be hard to integrate reftex into an ECB-layout
with the already builtin ECB-integration-framework...This should be possible
also with current ECB release 1.93...

Ciao
Klaus

-- 
Klaus Berndl                    mailto: klaus.berndl@sdm.de
sd&m AG                         http://www.sdm.de
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