Re: [Vim-latex-devel] Features like preview-latex

[Srinath A. <sr...@fa...>]

Hi Aditya,

On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

> this package for preview-latex (http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net/) for
> xemacs, and by the look of it, it looks really impressive.
>  The main feature that I am concerned about is the ability to display
> math. I always liked that feature in lyx also. I am wondering, why it can
> not be done in (g)vim. I think that one could use a unicode encoding for
> the file and replace \sum by sigma from unicode and go about it. The only
>
I must admit preview-latex does sound extremeley impressive and might be
very useful. But IMHO you underestimate the complexity of rendering
equations using unicode fonts. Simple things like $x^2 + y^2 = z^2$
might be fine, because most probably we could just use the singe line
itself, but with more complex equations where the latex source occupies
much more space than the equation displayed, things will get very very
complex indeed.

You will notice that preview-latex actually runs latex and then
ghostscript to generate the bitmap and then displays that inline in the
document. I beleive that a project which aims to do something like this
in native vim script is going to be as complicated as LaTeX itself!

Infact, an easier solution would be to patch VIM itself to allow for
inline graphics and then use the same route which preview-latex does.
Ofcourse, having delved into the VIM source only very briefly, I do not
know if this is even feasible.

Quite frankly, I would not even attempt something this complicated
myself :(

Also, for simple things like displaying the actual greek character theta
instead of \theta, the greek Sigma character in place of \sum etc, I
beleive someone has already done something like that in VIM. I do not
have the URL handy though. And I wonder how they handle the case where
in some places, the user wants \sum but wants to display \sigma in other
places...

Srinath