Hello Thank you all for your interest. Here are some comments.
In this situation there's not much difference, in my view, between a web service and a callable function. One of the simplest forms for a web service is as a remote procedure call (RPC). What is important about MathTran, as Hermann Kraus has noticed, is that it is very quick. At some future time, it should be possible to run MathTran locally, on one's own PC. Providing LaTeX syntax for MathTran is important, but not as easy as plain TeX. This is because MathTran has to avoid accidental or malicious side-effects. MathTran is written in Python, but it has two parts, a client and a server, which communicate via a socket. Both parts happen to be written in Python, but there is no real reason why a C++ client (Scribus) should not make requests to the MathTran server (Python). I hope this answers the questions people have asked. I'd certainly be pleased if Scribus were to develop and interface that allowed it to use MathTran. With best regards Jonathan
