Re: Latex plugin

[Alan Horkan <horkana tcd ie>]

On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, James K.Lowden wrote:

> Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 16:51:48 -0400
> From: James K.Lowden <jklowden@speakeasy.org>
> Reply-To: dia-list@gnome.org
> To: dia-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: Latex plugin
>
> On Sat, 31 Aug 2002 18:16:30 +0100 (IST), Alan Horkan <horkana@tcd.ie>
> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, Ben V wrote:
> > >
> > > But there is something i am a bit struglling with, is to
> > > write equation or at least greek symbols.
> > > Would it be possible, to have a plugin, which will allows to
> > > write some text and seen it interpreted in Latex?
>
> > As previously suggested the symbol font sounds like the best way to go
> > about this.  i think gcharmap (or gcharacter or something similar, why
> > the bastards could not just call it charmap <sigh>) would help you do
> > this.
> >
> > Maybe in future Dia could have some way to invoke the Character Map or
> > some sort of insert Symbol Dialog, I dunno, so many things to do, so
> > little time.
>
> I'm sure there are many details I don't understand, but two thoughts:

I dont have a clue (ugh tired, hungry)
but he seems to have sorted himself out.

> 1.  I doubt the symbol font is of much use to Ben V.  I don't think the
> quadratic formula or much of Chapter 1 from a caluculus text could be
> expressed with a symbol font.

> 2.  It seems to me that MathML might be a better fit with Dia than Latex.

Dia already allows TeX, it is in the FAQ, silly me.

> MathML is XML and could be embedded in Dia diagrams much the way SVG is.
> DSSSL stylesheets (http://www.nag.co.uk/projects/OpenMath/mml-files/)
> render it to TeX and others.  There is also an XSLT
> (http://www.raleigh.ru/MathML/mmltex/index.php?lang=en).
>
> GtkMathView (http://www.cs.unibo.it/helm/mml-widget/) is a MathML viewing
> widget, and might be a place to start.

I wonder how well Dia handles arbitrary XML?

Inevitabley there will be new things added to Dia that you dont want older
version to choke on and there is always something new that people want to
do to extent the format.

I pondered that Dia should have insert Object rather than insert picture.
If the object was not supported a placeholder would be displayed instead
(possibly a raster image if it was somethign like maths or Visio XML
that was not currently supported, or simply an error message that it was
not supported).

I dunno, i have too many crazy ideas and not enough code :)
So many possibilities.

Later
Alan

> HTH.
>
> --jkl
>
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