[texworks] Lua Extension - put into Sentance Case, Trim, Date Time, lowercase, uppercase

[Paul A Norman]

Dear Jonathan,

I have been thinking more about these sorts of things, and the usefulness of
other environments and the COM and related technmologies MS do, and I was
starting to think of  cross platform solutions and then the
whole XMLHttpRequest() mechanism came ot mind

Is it at all possible to have that kind of thing, where a port number, IP
and filename request can be issued and the cleaned up response text applied
to the selection in the Editor?  Would JavaScript in TW have an
XMLHttpRequest() type of object available?

I am pretty sure that Lazarus in Linux and definetly Delphi under Win32 and
many other programing environments let us define servers and assign them
listening ports, and straight Apache and Php is the obvious sort of thing I
have in mind.

It just seems mind blowing what could be achieved. Tap directly into
databases .., well do anything that the server that recives the request can
process.

Paul


2009/9/7 Jonathan Kew <jfkthame at googlemail.com>

> Just a quick note for now: yes, once the TL'09 release is out, scripting is
> one of the first new features I want to include in the development trunk.
>
> Don't assume, though, that the [first] scripting language will necessarily
> be Lua. Although Lua certainly seems to be on the rise in the TeX world,
> another very widely-known language is JavaScript, and it happens that Qt
> includes a lot of support for this right in the application frameworks. By
> using this, we can get a huge amount of functionality "for free", without
> the need to write (and maintain) extra code to interface the scripting
> language to the application's built-in objects and functions. So I think it
> makes sense to try this first, and then consider whether any additional
> language(s) may be needed.
>
> I have an experimental version with JavaScript support (based on Stefan's
> Lua patch, but much simpler because it doesn't have to provide the Lua
> interpreter or the "glue" code) that I will make available after we branch
> the stable TL release (shortly).
>
> And yes, the ability to have sub-menus (and shortcuts) for scripts, and
> easily modify them, is certainly desirable.
>
> JK
>
>
> On 7 Sep 2009, at 00:46, Paul A Norman wrote:
>
>   Dear Steffan,
>>
>> Thanks for that.
>>
>> I come from more a Delphi (Turbo Pascal) background so please excuse
>> anything I say as not working from a purely C workspace.
>>
>> The incorporation of a scripting language is a stroke of genius, so many
>> distributed editors do not do that or in Win32/64 were in the past just
>> plugging VBA in.
>>
>> PHP
>>
>> In Delphi we can extend an application's functionality using a PHP
>> extension which opens up all the libraries and code of PHP (
>> http://users.telenet.be/ws36637/php4delphi.html) this plugs into the PHP
>> Zend C API - you can think what I am going to ask here, can TW being a C
>> written application better do this as well as LUA? Or could LUA be asked to
>> handle this for TW - its just that there is such a wealth of string
>> libraries and other  platform independant libaries already available under
>> PHP.
>>
>> Dynamic Menu / Sub-Menu Items
>> I think I suggested privately to Alain (again form my Delphi background)
>> that the Scripts (LUA) names be utilised to show where they should go on the
>> Scripts menu.
>>
>> I was thinking that the Scripts will be more important than many realise
>> at first, in that they will provide a lot of stringhandling utilities and
>> placement of custom tags (custom LaTeX commands), so they will probably
>> increase in number for many users very quickly.
>>
>> This made me think from previous experiences that the Script menu would
>> become cumbersome and over full,  very quickly.
>>
>> As (in Delphi) I am used to being able to make new sub-menus and menu
>> items dynamiacally at run time, I wondered whether this was possible in TW
>> as well?
>>
>> Thinking perhaps that the LUA script name could place it on the menu tree
>> and call for the making of new sub-menu(s) as needed.
>> I.e. lua script name:  Insert-LaTeX_Pictures_Righthand-Logos.lua
>>
>> - for space
>>  _ for new Sub menu
>>
>> Would go on Menu     Scripts/Insert LateX/Pictures/Righthand Logos
>>
>> Or perhaps it could be a property of the script  in the Script Management
>> tool, plcaement on which (sub)(sub)Menu?
>>
>> It would be a great help to us users!
>>
>> Paul
>>
>> 2009/9/6 Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 2009-09-02 11:44, GMAIL wrote:
>> >
>> > message from TeXworks user
>> >
>> > I am very new to Lua as no doubt the following will confirm, but I
>> > have been able to hobble this together from the Tutorials and chm help
>> > and other Lua Wiki resources.
>> >
>> > Share it in case it inspires any one else...
>> >
>>
>> Thanks for putting the time into this and for sharing. I haven't tested
>> it intensively, but the first impression is great. It's good to see
>> people testing the new (experimental) features of TeXworks.
>>
>> > (Also wondering, does TW object expose any more properties or methods
>> > please?
>> >
>>
>> Yes, that's definitely planned. So far, the Lua implementation is very
>> experimental and basically just a prove of concept. After the first
>> official release, we'll brainstorm new development plans for Tw, and Lua
>> will certainly be in there. Then we'll probably also be drafting a
>> reasonable API with more properties, methods, etc. so that it gets
>> really usable. The methods provided so far are only quick hacks to show
>> that it can be done (as you proved with your scripts ;)).
>>
>> Stefan
>>
>> <user_Lua_Menu.png>
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/texworks/attachments/20090910/764b42c2/attachment.html>