[Pmwiki-users] Re: latest news on the math front

Christian Ridderström chr
Sat Feb 7 06:41:31 CST 2004


First a thought:

It might be interesting to support more tools than just 'mimetex', since 
people have differet preferences and possibilities of installing them.
On this 'mimetex' page:
	http://www.forkosh.com/mimetexmanual.html#tools
they mention similar tools and give links to:
	http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/textogif/textogif.html
	http://www.math.uio.no/~martingu/gladtex/


On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 06:10:56PM +0100, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> > It's working pretty well, here's a test area:
> > 
> >    http://www.lyx.org/~chr/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=MathTest.MathTest
> > 
> > I've also added a directive [[mimetex: x = y ]] that doesn't use
> > latex/dvipng, but a very small tool called mimetex which produces gifs.
> > The advantage with that tool is that latex doesn't have to be installed.
> 
> Christian-
> 
> This is really cool.  I think it's a good idea to break this module
> into two modules, one that uses mimeTeX and another that uses LaTeX or
> something more robust if needed.  A WikiAdmin can then choose whichever
> approach is most appropriate for his users/server, and both approaches
> can use the same markup.

I'd even say three modules... one basic module that deals with the cache 
issues, and two modules (one for each tool) that do the actual conversion.
That way it'll be quite straightforward to support additional tools.

> > Unfortunately the interest for using this on the lyx wiki is low, so I'd
> > like to hand it over to someone else. (I'm working on a few other pmwiki
> > projects that will be of use for the lyx wiki, so I'm giving them prioriy)
> 
> I'll be glad to take over the mathTeX version, as it will be of use to
> many of my colleagues at TAMUCC.

Great!

>  All can experiment with it on the beta
> site at http://www.pmichaud.com/work/beta/pmwiki.php/MimeTeX/MimeTeX .
> The code I used is at http://www.pmichaud.com/work/beta/local/mimetex.php
> -- I'll clean it up and add it to the Cookbook when 0.6 is released.
> 
> Some changes I made:
>   * I chose {$ ... $} as the markup instead of [[$ ... $]], since a lot
>     of directives already begin with [[$.

Why does that matter? Performance? And maybe you should use '{{$' instead, 
to prevent something like: {$Revision: 1.3 $} to be picked up.

>   * It doesn't need the external shell script--just the location of
>     the mimetex binary itself.

Makes sense, I just used that because I didn't hear about mimetex until
after I was done with the latex code.

>   * I put the cached images in 0.6's pub directory, so they're easily
>     accessible to browsers.

Hmm.. maybe that should be something like 'pub/cache/tex' instead of
'pub/cache', in case other types of informatino will be cached in the
future?

>   * I'm using simple md5 hashes for the image filenames, as I'm
>     comfortable with the low probability of collisions.

That's a bad practice IMHO, but it's up to you. I do suggest however that 
you make it possible to verify that it's the correct image that's being 
returned. Especially if you don't maintain a separate cache directory for 
the latex things.

> P.S.:  Christian--let me know if the credit I'm giving you in the 
> mimetex.php file is sufficient/appropriate.

It's fine.

Some additional ideas:

* Add an action that clears the cache... 

A final thought: If you will use the latex method, it might be interesting 
to allow the user to also define a preamble, e.g. like this:
	[[latex-preamble:Main.Preamble1]]
where the preamble would simply be the source of the page Main.Preamble1

Alternatively, 

	[[begin:latex-preamble]]
	\usepackage{...}
	[[include:Main.Preamble1]]
	[[end:latex-preamble]]

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr





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