On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 1:37 AM, Freddie Witherden <fred...@witherden.org>wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As many of you know I have something of an interest (some would say
> unhealthy one) in the LaTeX output produced by Sympy. While this is
> currently at a very high standard (I would go so far as to say that
> Sympy produces the best LaTeX output of all major CAS software) the
> problem of rendering the outputted LaTeX still stands.
>
> A couple of days ago Ondřej pointed me to Mathtext, which is the TeX
> rendering library for matplotlib. Over the last day or so I have been
> toying around with it. My conclusions are:
>
> 1. The code is a textbook (dare I say TeX-book) implementation of the
> algorithm used internally by TeX to typeset equations. It is reasonably
> feature complete, however some extensions (such as \operatorname{}) are
> missing.
>
> 2. The code has a minimal dependency on matplotlib, only really making
> use of the rendering backends, which are themselves very simple.
>
> 3. There is, however, a dependency on Freetype -- which although not bad
> (it is available on all platforms and very few systems, *nix or
> otherwise do not have a copy of it somewhere) -- is not ideal.
>
> 4. The output is of reasonable quality -- however some of the spacing
> rules appear to be in need of tweaking.
>
> 5. Many of the backends which it targets are redundant: SVG, AGG, PS/PDF
> and raw bitmap are all eclipsed by Cairo (which provides a common API
> for all of them). Therefore can probably be omitted.
>
> 6. Parsing is done by way of pyparsing and appears to be quite clean,
> however will need extending in order to support enough of TeX.
>
> The potential gains from splitting it off are:
>
> 1. Easy equation rendering for all Python GUI applications. Producing
> LaTeX is easy, and Cairo/Qt (the two backends I am seriously interested
> in) are both widely used for GUI apps.
>
> 2. Speed. Server-side equation rendering should be possible with minimal
> overhead. (Just parsing + text rendering.)
>
> 3. Flexibility. It will be possible to grab a LaTeX equation as an
> SVG/PNG/PDF. This could be useful for web-based systems. (At least three
> major browsers will take a pop at rendering an SVG.)
>
> Overall I believe it to be worthwhile to take the effort to split it
> from matplotlib and make it into its own project.
>
> Hence I am currently interested in the opinions of others on the idea. I
> am aware that there was a GSoC proposal for it a year or so ago and am
> potentially interested in applying this year. However, this all depends
> on if you think the project is a worthwhile undertaking.
hi Freddie. A *fast* png/svg is something i would be very glad to see. It is
the main
problem I am faced when I want to output sympy's result in a web page (
http://empathy.sympy.org/beta/)
>
>
> Comments/opinions/ideas? Should I consider this as a GSoC project?
>
> Regards, Freddie.
>
--
Fabian, http://fseoane.net/blog/
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