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% starting.tex
%
% \begin{stealth} \pspage{page_skew.ps} \end{stealth}

\chapter{The Future of LameTeX}

Most of my effort was to make this understand LaTeX code. Now I 
can concentrate on other functionality, like making it work better,
understand more LaTeX functions, and - best of all - providing easier
ways to include PostScript hacks into the document.

I want to try out some experiments with on-line document viewing.
There's no reason why a TeX-like language like the Stealth Commands
couldn't drive PostScript animation through a previewer or let the
user include audio in the document.

Although I love PostScript dearly, more coding really should go into
C++. I'll let PostScript do all the fancy graphics, but C++ should do
more of the decision making, because it is very difficult to write and
maintain large programs in Postscript version 1.0. I would make use of
some fancy PostScript interpreter to do some of the PostScript
processing while processing the input file.

LameTeX should in general produce a smaller output. I would like to
write a compress mode to make sleek uncommented PostScript.

There is no glue in LameTeX currently, which means that two words that
happen to be side by side may have a pagebreak or a linebreak
in-between them. There is no way to prevent this in the current
version of LameTeX.

You can't use a previewer program that looks for the fancy Adobe
PageBreak PostScript comment. Sorry. The PostScript program doesn't
``know'' where the page breaks are going to come until run time.

I would like to write better tools and better documentation so that
people unfamiliar with PostScript can still try out a few hacks like
grayscale or font changing.

Obviously, LameTeX should handle spacing better. It should do vertical
alignment. LameTeX should be smart enough to handle the TeX
hyphenation dictionary and be able to handle the fonts directly, which
are currently being done in a big hack that barely works.

Using normal PostScript scaleable fonts should be simple and let the
user save a lot of room in the PostScript output file.

The user should be able to define new LameTeX commands. This includes
normal ones attach to LaTeX made with $\backslash$newcommand
$\backslash$newenvironment $\backslash$newtheorem, and special Stealth
ones hooked either to C, C++, or PostScript code.

I'm hoping to hear a slew of requests for enhancements and (ahem) bug
fixes! So I should have plenty to do.

I'm going to have to do some investigation to see if I can ``trick''
LaTeX or TeX into giving me a raw paragraph with a bounding box. If
so, then I could hook up a great deal of functionality like math mode
by fooling TeX into making the output and then snarfing the result.

The token parsing is done all wrong and should be cleaned up and made
to model LaTeX parsing.

TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society. \\
PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems Incoporated. \\
LameTeX ain't a trademark!