Re: preview-latex 0.9.1 and AUCTeX 11.whatever

Ralf Angeli <[email protected]> writes:

> * David Kastrup (2005-03-19) writes:
>
>> b) all documentation should refer to the new mailing lists (that
>> should work at the time of the release), CVS archives, web pages,
>> whatever.
> [...]
>> And I also do not want to wait too long for that.  The next AUCTeX
>> will probably be called 11.60 if we don't bundle preview-latex, and
>> 11.90 if we do bundle it.
>
> In case preview-latex gets bundled with AUCTeX, I'd like to discuss
> how this should be reflected on the web page.

Not at all.  More precisely: regardless of whether we bundle it with
AUCTeX immediately, we still need to do something about the web page.
The developer archive has been moved into AUCTeX, bug reporting is
diverted, mailing lists are being faded out.  The preview-latex page
is quite outdated with regards to screen shots and similar.

I think that I would still like to crank out preview-latex 0.9.1, but
with all references in it appropriately pointing to AUCTeX.  And I
would like to have the next AUCTeX release contain preview-latex
bundled.

> We currently have a single page which already is a bit lengthy.  In
> order to allow people having a peek of what is about to come further
> down the page and making that easily accessible I want to provide a
> navigation menu.  This will probably be placed where the screenshots
> are now and the screenshots themselves will move further down.  That
> means the page will look something like this:
>
> +------------------------------------------------------------------+
> | AUCTeX  An integrated TeX/LaTeX environment                      |
> +--------------------------------------------------+---------------+
> | About                                            | Navigation    |
> | ------------------------------------------------ | About         |
> | Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text     | Features      |
> | Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text     | Download      |
> | ...                                              | Documentation |
> |                                                  | ...           |
> |                                                  | Screenshots   |
> |                                                  | +-----------+ |
> |                                                  | |           | |
> |                                                  | |           | |
> |                                                  | +-----------+ |
>
> Does preview-latex need a separate page?

If you take a look at the current page of preview-latex
<URL:http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net>, you'll notice that apart
from the requirements, there is not much more except screen shots and
a pointer to "other software" on a separate page.  Oh, and a "donate"
key, but nobody ever used that, I believe (I think that the single
donation made via SourceForge during all the life time of the project
was not done through the preview-latex home page).

So I don't think that we need a separate page unless somebody
volunteers to create it.  And we should redo screen shots to match the
current version, so there is not really much that remains from old
material...

> The more preview-latex gets integrated the less this will make
> sense.  So what we could do instead is splitting the page into
> smaller chunks based on the current sections.  Then it would be
> possible to better describe preview-latex in the Features section.

Sounds sensible.

> With smaller chunks users would have to do more paging which I am
> not really a fan of[1], although there are some nice, clean
> examples[2] on the net.
>
> Another challenge will be the screenshots.  Personally I like them
> very much at the place they currently are.  But if we want to show
> examples of preview-latex as well, the front page might become to
> demanding in terms of download size (besides, it will not work if
> there is only few content left after chunking).

The thumbnails are not that demanding, especially if you use gimp to
reduce them to a non-dithered 16 color indexed palette and convert to
PNG.  That gives really small size: I use this process to send
full-size screenshots to mailing lists, and they usually stay within
16kB or so.  For thumbnails, this should be fine.

> Anyway, I was just thinking loudly.  It would help me juggling this
> stuff, though, if we decided what has to be added when preview-latex
> gets integrated.

It gets integrated.  Period.  About one or two sentences mentioning
that this was a separate project earlier (can be "has to be downloaded
from <...> and compiled separately at the current point of time", to
be changed to "was previously available separately and is integrated
as of AUCTeX-11.90"), and then it is feature description and screen
shots like anything else.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum