Re: [xwiki-users] Latex html in editor for math formulas?

Paul Libbrecht wrote: Hi, We're currently using FOP to generate PDFs. FOP cannot use DVIs (at least not currently, with the available external resource plugins). It does support some EPS. However, using the TeX system brings some problems: - there is a dependency on an external tool, as we cannot bundle a TeX system. - TeX is pretty slow. If it is used only for generating the PDF export of a wiki document with few equations, then that is not a major issue, since exporting PDF is not something frequently done. But imagine using it for displaying a document with several equations (>20), and how long it would take to make 20 shell commands to start TeX, generate the eps files, load those files from the disk, and send them to the client. No way this would work without a proper cache. Another way to generate nice graphics from LaTeX equations is by combining these tools: one that converts LaTeX to MathML, and one that converts MathML to something else. The first tool is needed as LaTeX is not quite an open standard. There is only one fully supported compiler, and it has limitations. On the other hand, MathML is interesting even as a final equation format, as some browsers have support for it, although with some problems. But there are many tools that work with MathML, viewers, editors, converters... Two candidates I found during a small Google session: http://math.etsu.edu/LaTeXMathML/LaTeXMathML.js -> LaTeX => MathML converter in JavaScript. The code should be converted to Java, so that the whole process can be done in the native language for XWiki. http://jeuclid.sourceforge.net/ -> MathML multipurpose tool. among others, it has a MathML => PNG converter, and a FOP plugin to directly support MathML in the XML source, which are preserved in the generated PDF. This means that we don't need to separately convert equations into something else and then include some images in the PDF, but we can use one XML file that contains all the XHTML source and the MathML equations. These tools can be combined into a Radeox filter + macro. The filter allows a fast syntax, like $$\sum(i)$$, while the macro allows some customization, like {latex:align=right|zoom=2|background=yellow}\sum(i){latex} Another TeX=>MML converter I found is BlahTeXML, but it is written in C. And the code is not so comprehensible, so porting it to java will be harder. However, by comparing the size of blah and the js converter above, I'd say that probably blah does a better job at the conversion. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/