[texworks] Wishlist for pdf previewer

[Jonathan Kew]

On 26 Sep 2011, at 14:42, Carlo Marmo wrote:

> Well, I agree common sense and experience should definitely do the job. 
> Sometime, in order to meet special requirements, I have to provide the Flesch–Kincaid readability index for each piece of writing I submit to my institution. This provide numeric data that measures how easy it is to read your document. Ms Word has a special readability built-in tool. So I have to convert my output pdf files in .doc to check readability trough ms word. From my point of view, it would be great to have a similar tool for Tw. 

Such a tool doesn't belong as part of TW, in my opinion.

It would be virtually impossible to implement this in a general way, so that it would work with arbitrary (La|Con|*)TeX(t) documents; any such tool would be designed for a certain limited class of documents (e.g. a specific language, using a particular collection of LaTeX packages and a carefully controlled layout), and would need to be adapted to work under different circumstances.

If the documents that matter to you follow a sufficiently well-defined form that you can reliably implement something like this, fine: do so as an external tool, and run it from a script if you want to access it from within TW. But it won't be a generic "readability analyser" for TeX documents, it'll be a special-purpose tool for your specific needs, and it doesn't belong in the actual TW product.

JK

> 
> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 1:18 PM, BPJ <bpj at melroch.se> wrote:
> On 2011-09-26 08:51, Carlo Marmo wrote:
> not sure this is duable or relevant for most of you. what about adding an
> index of readability tool like ms word?
> 
> Wouldn't that be (human) language-dependent? Or are you talking of
> *graphical* readability? I prefer to use my acquired experience /
> common sense for both kinds (except that philological typesetting
> is rather restricted to a few, fortunately quite good, fonts for
> availability reasons).
> 
> /bpj
>