[OS X TeX] FlashMode, Up Close and Personal, TeX plug-in

[Arthur Ogawa]

I must applaud the development of FlashMode (I simply loved Textures  
when I could still use it.)

Is anyone thinking about how texd might fit into this picture? The TeX  
Daemon is a really powerful concept.

One of the great things about Tom Rokicki's TeX previewer for NeXTStep  
was its ability to give you the preview of a page before TeX had  
finished typesetting the entire file. Is anyone thinking about how  
this might be done today?

Is anyone thinking about the Other Great Thing that Textures did?  
(Blue Sky called it "Up Close and Personal".) When you would click in  
the preview window, you were immediately taken to the corresponding  
place in your source (which was a different window, you understand),  
and vice versa. I know how it was done, and I wonder if it can be  
reproduced under Mac OS X.

The only remaining thing would be the ability to have TeX manage a  
portion of a window for another application. This is the basis of Blue  
Sky's Quark XPress plug-in and its InDesign plug-in. This embedding  
technique harkens back to SmallTalk and was implemented by Microsoft  
as DDE (?), later renamed ActiveX, I think. Apple had its own stab at  
the concept, calling it OpenDoc.

Embedding would require a document architecture that would accommodate  
message passing between the application managing the document and the  
application managing the document portion. Perhaps this architecture  
already exists (based on Mach, I would guess), perhaps it does not.  
But Microsoft Windows has embedding working (since more than 10 years  
ago) in applications like Word, using Design Science MathType to  
handle math. Very slick.

Arthur Ogawa