[Pmwiki-users] Re: More blue skye stuff...

Christian Ridderström chr
Wed Feb 4 16:54:09 CST 2004


On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Robin Sheat wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 11:25:01PM +0100, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> > I think the math editor in LyX is awesome, and in the end I was actually
> > doing quite a bit of vector algegra using LyX for jotting down results
> > (rather than using paper and pen...)  Anyway, I think it'd be really cool
> > if we could make writing math on a wikipage as easy as writing normal
> > text. However, I can't imagine "normal" people writing something that 
> > looks like LaTeX as wiki markup, so a tool is needed.
> Making a tool would require doing something like having a Java applet 
> (or maybe a XUL program, but that's kinda restrictive) to do it. 

If you mean that allowing "graphical" editing of formulas will require a 
tool, then yes. 

> However, I wouldn't mind using standard LaTeX notation and having it 
> automagically converted to a .png on the fly. I have a script that does 
> this for some presentation software (magicpoint), so I can embed 
> x=\frac{a}{b} directly into it. How hard would this be to implement in 
> PmWiki?

Pretty easy I imagine... although it's important to know how long each 
conversion takes (caching is probably needed). And then there's safety...
I don't think we can allow arbitrary LaTeX to execute on the server.

There is a thing called preview-latex
	http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net/
that might be useful for this... it renders a latex formula (it's used 
for people writing Latex with an Emacs, so that formulas are shown as 
they will look when the paper is printed, instead of the latex code)

Could you send me a copy of your script that convert's the formula into 
.png?

> Some of the things that I use it for (research notes and so on) 
> would make use of it. Assuming, naturally, that I have some basic tools 
> on my server (which I do because it is a desktop machine) such as LaTeX 
> and ImageMagick.
> 
> Your markup could be something like [[$x=\frac{a}{b}$]] :)
> 
> 

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr





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