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x-symbol
by ad on Monday 24/Mar/2008, @15:16

I'm still hoping to get X-Symbol like capabilities someday. This would allow to parse tokens and display them as symbols. Some examples of applications are:

LaTeX:
Parse \prod and replace it with a product symbol, \rightarrow with the appropriate arrow, produce super and subscripts, etc etc giving a semi wysiwyg. Would be great for Kile, for instance.

Haskell:
In literature type vars are usually greek letters. Syntax could be provided to obtain that effect, say alpha, beta, alpha_1, beta_1. Some other tokens could be shown as pretty symbols, such as ->, =>, ++...

Theorem Proving:
Coq, Isabelle, et all. All of them use plenty of mathematical notation.

http://x-symbol.sourceforge.net/
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58340

Related Links

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Re: x-symbol
by danielHL on Monday 24/Mar/2008, @16:21

Sorry, but why wysiwyg? LaTeX is totally the other way round. If you want it in spite of that, use LyX.

An interesting feature for Kile would be inline spell checking, though.

CU
Daniel

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Re: x-symbol
by ad on Tuesday 25/Mar/2008, @06:46

It's not wysiwyg. It renders a few tokens as symbols. For instance, while one could use tokens to create accentuated characters, such as \'a for à, things become quite unreadable. Most people are not that hardcore and either input isolatin (or unicode) characters directly, or use x-symbol for the same effect while keeping the file in ASCII. X-symbol allows you to go one step further and render other tokens as symbols.

In any case, personally I don't even use it with LaTeX. But I find it great for use with other systems, such as theorem provers, since you can see proper math symbols in your formulas. And I would love to be able to use it with some programming languages.

Look at the bottom of the screenshot:
http://proofgeneral.inf.ed.ac.uk/images/pg-isa-screenshot.png

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Re: x-symbol
by cruzki on Tuesday 25/Mar/2008, @06:49

Inline spell checking is THE most interesting feature for kate I think.

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Re: x-symbol
by suy on Wednesday 26/Mar/2008, @11:31

It's not wysiwyg, it's giving code written it TeX some possibilities that are just fine in XML. E.g.: if you want to type the pi constant, in TeX you have to type \pi. In XML you can use π, but if you are using UTF-8, you can also type the real character with the keyboard, or with kcharselect (I can't type it here, because the software that runs the site is very outdated).

In mathematical formulas this sucks a lot, because not only the code becomes much less readable, but also the lines become a lot longer, and it's very difficult to wrap each line of the code to 80 characters, and still making each line a step of some calculation.

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