[Etoys] finalStripping hangs waitForCommand

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Tuesday 16 June 2009 08:11:34 pm Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> > Once Etoys gets a good typesetter plugin, OSProcess may no longer be
> > required.
> > Any takers?
>
> Pango is supposed to be pretty good for regular text paragraphs.
> Doesn't layout formulas of course.
Or Kannada text when we started two years back. In fact, the quality of 
Kannada class test papers typeset by LaTeX was one of the motivators using 
Squeak in our project. LaTeX was tempting but the learning curve was steep for 
teachers and kids who barely knew English. With Squeak, they could play with 
LaTeX easily in a virtual computer.
> The proper way would have been to make a very simple custom plugin
> that has just a single primitive invoking a shell script doing the
> LaTeX processing.
True. In fact, LatexMorph uses a Latex class that was to become a plugin. 
OSProcess allowed me to prototype many ideas rapidly in Squeak itself. It 
turned to be fast enough to typeset in near real-time (2+ per second), so I 
never got around to writing that plugin :-).

Subbu