On Wednesday 06 March 2002 08:54 am, you wrote:
> Ian Piumarta in the past has done various versions of TEX and (I
> think) LaTEX in some version of Smalltalk (maybe VisualWorks).
>
> I think the TEX constraint solver is great, but it really needs a UI
> to allow WYSIWYG editing rather than the 1960s (bad) style of markup
> editing. (Remember WYSIWYG doesn't mean closed format. That's just
> the way MS decided to do it.)
>
> It would be terrific to have such a solver with an integrated editor
> as an central part of Squeak's layout powers.
>
> Let's drag some of these good ideas kicking and screaming into the
> 21st century (or at least the 70s).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
>

	May I Suggest ConTeXt as a base for such efforts? it provides a cleaner 
and more powerful set of commands than LaTeX, in fact, it's a set of TeX 
macros written by a firm in the netherlands. The biggest problem I had with 
LaTeX was the fact that some modules were incompatible, and others were old 
and feature incomplete.

	What support ConTeXt lacks for some LaTeX modules, it is being provided, 
either in a new form, or as a wrapper ( AMSTeX ).

	Their website is www.pragma-pod.nl, and go check out their examples. You 
can even generate interactive PDF files from inside Context.

	It's a nice system, and I've done a LOT more with ConTeXt in the past 
months than I ever got done with LaTeX.

	Devising a output system that can make use of the ConTeXt Verbatim 
environment would allow very nice pretty printing of SmallTalk code.

	-Daniel