Re: GSoC project - LaTeX/TeX

After few hours ( maybe a day ) of searching, experimenting and thinking. I finally have some modest plan or idea how could

be Latex interpreter implemented into Octave. I will try to present my ideas and conclusions here. Be free, to correct me if I've

made a mistake, or if there is something what can be done better. So here's how I imagine interpreter:

1) Text extraction

After some text object appear in .m file or in typed directly in Octave, it will be read and moved ( copied ) into default .tex file.

Example of this kind of file is in attachment under name default. I presented just minimal set of code for rendering trough Latex.

There are many variations of code that work, this set is something I think is minimal and stable.

2) Converting

After first step there is .tex file ready for converting. In my opinion, I would first convert it to .eps , to get bounding box.

latex default.tex

dvips default.dvi -o -E default.eps

This two program convert .tex -> .dvi and then .dvi -> .eps . When dvips is called, we give him two parameters firs -E enables

slicing off just formula. Second is known, it's changing the name of output file. In attachment are outputs of these two programs.

If you try to open .eps file in any text editing tool, you can find line %%BoundingBox: 158 632 265 645. This information can be used

for some sort of placeholders in Octave plot.

For converting we can use many different programs proposed by Ben. And I want to thank him for his help. But more or less they are

same as this combination. If some of them have any new functionality, it needs additional dependencies. I will mention them here if

accidentally missed a good functionality.

3) Rasterize image and place it on plot

This final step is to convert .eps file to .png image and then put it into placeholder. Converting .eps to bitmap image is done trough

Ghostscript.

gs -dEPSCrop -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -r600 -sDEVICE=pnggray -sOutputFile=defaulteps.png "default.eps"

Output is also in attachment. Scaling factor is 8.3 , BoundaryBox from .eps file is 107x13 pixels and image of .png file is

892x108 pixels. This final image could be attached to plot or somehow integrated before rendering. I'm not sure how could we do this,

and I would appreciate any help, suggestion or direction regarding this problem. I worked with OpenGL before, but just used it for

drawing points representing molecules of 2D fluid simulation.

That's all, maybe I wanted to write something in addition but I forgot.

Andrej