[texworks] Scripting: Any Windowed Application that Can Write to the Console

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi,

Am 2010-04-20 15:13, schrieb Paul A Norman:
> Ive been looking at some of the recent html and like issues from a
> different perspective.
>
> And came to the somewhat obvious  conclussion that with the work that
> has already gone into providing scripting in Tw and the availablilty
> of the system function, anything that could write to the console under
> its OS could provide capturable text for Tw to us, and this may hep in
> the current discussion.
>
> What I was not sure about esp for MS Windows was that a windowed
> application (forms application)  could readily do this in a thread
> safe manner and not hit name-space issues.
>   

I would urge some caution here. As exciting as you solution may sound,
one of the basic principles of Tw is that it's cross-platform. Scripting
was also designed to work in an interpreted language, i.e. on all
supported platforms. What you're proposing now is inherently
system-dependent. While this can be done for all supported systems in
principle (see the python and lua scripting plugins), it's a tremendous
effort. I don't think that this can reasonably be achieved from outside
the "official" codebase.

Don't get me wrong: it's a great idea. I just want to avoid the creation
of a two (or more) class society where a few people write some awesome
scripts/apps that only work for a fraction of the users of Tw. Instead,
there is still some work into bringing (more or less) full UI design
capabilities to scripting, and there's still the other languages (I know
that python can do an awesome lot of stuff - I suppose it's the same for
lua). So my plead is to consider those before heading off writing Delphi
applications.

-Stefan