% starting.tex % % \begin{stealth} \pspage{page_skew.ps} \end{stealth} \chapter{The Future of LameTeX} Most of my effort was to make this understand LaTeX code. Now I can concentrate on other functionality, like making it work better, understand more LaTeX functions, and - best of all - providing easier ways to include PostScript hacks into the document. I want to try out some experiments with on-line document viewing. There's no reason why a TeX-like language like the Stealth Commands couldn't drive PostScript animation through a previewer or let the user include audio in the document. Although I love PostScript dearly, more coding really should go into C++. I'll let PostScript do all the fancy graphics, but C++ should do more of the decision making, because it is very difficult to write and maintain large programs in Postscript version 1.0. I would make use of some fancy PostScript interpreter to do some of the PostScript processing while processing the input file. LameTeX should in general produce a smaller output. I would like to write a compress mode to make sleek uncommented PostScript. There is no glue in LameTeX currently, which means that two words that happen to be side by side may have a pagebreak or a linebreak in-between them. There is no way to prevent this in the current version of LameTeX. You can't use a previewer program that looks for the fancy Adobe PageBreak PostScript comment. Sorry. The PostScript program doesn't ``know'' where the page breaks are going to come until run time. I would like to write better tools and better documentation so that people unfamiliar with PostScript can still try out a few hacks like grayscale or font changing. Obviously, LameTeX should handle spacing better. It should do vertical alignment. LameTeX should be smart enough to handle the TeX hyphenation dictionary and be able to handle the fonts directly, which are currently being done in a big hack that barely works. Using normal PostScript scaleable fonts should be simple and let the user save a lot of room in the PostScript output file. The user should be able to define new LameTeX commands. This includes normal ones attach to LaTeX made with $\backslash$newcommand $\backslash$newenvironment $\backslash$newtheorem, and special Stealth ones hooked either to C, C++, or PostScript code. I'm hoping to hear a slew of requests for enhancements and (ahem) bug fixes! So I should have plenty to do. I'm going to have to do some investigation to see if I can ``trick'' LaTeX or TeX into giving me a raw paragraph with a bounding box. If so, then I could hook up a great deal of functionality like math mode by fooling TeX into making the output and then snarfing the result. The token parsing is done all wrong and should be cleaned up and made to model LaTeX parsing. TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society. \\ PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems Incoporated. \\ LameTeX ain't a trademark!