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Subject:
From:
Hans Aberg <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 13 Oct 1997 16:55:20 +0200
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Sebastian Rahtz <[log in to unmask]>:
>What is the relationship between GUIs and MIME?

  I am not an expert on this, but MIME is supposed to rather extensive,
allowing not only simple 8-bit encodings, but also for allowing graphics
and sounds in emails. Now, people feel that strictly speaking a computer
GUI should be interactive, so perhaps this does not qualify.

> Of course if his
>correspondent sends him a Word file, he'll need to load Word to read
>it, but if its a MIME-encoded .tex file, he'll have no problem.

  One makes the setup automatic by the use of file name extensions: The
MIME encoding ensures that the binary files pass through the mail system
unaltered. Then I have the setup so that .dvi files are automatically
launched to a DVI reader, .pdf files are sent to the PDF reader Acrobat,
and so on: The received email has these attachments displayed with small
icons; I just activate an icon, and the file is displayed properly in the
right program.

>Perhaps I am just being smug because I finally got a working mime
>setup for gnu emacs and the vm mail reader, after 1000001 tries :-}
>
>Seems to me that emacs gives you best of all worlds these days;

  Emacs can handle styled text (if somebody bothers writing a script), so I
think there should be possible with Emacs. Styled text is particularly nice
with computer code, like C++, Haskell, and so on: Styles are programmed to
show up dependant on the syntactic context, comments key words and so on.
(But I do not know if there are such TeX/LaTeX styling scripts written. --
If now LaTeX builds on a Pascal syntax, it should be possible to get some
nice displays.) On my Mac, function definitions and the like of a file are
automatically displayed in a list; click a button, and you jump to that
definition. One can click on an URL in the text in any program, and a
program that can handle that protocol is automatically selected to act on
that URL: In fact, very convenient.

> You
>can drive everything with keystrokes, explicit commands, menus or
>mice.

  So this is a good example: The GUI version of Emacs is in fact easy to
use, without one having to learn all those cryptic key combination, but you
can still use command key-strokes for often used operations.

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>

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