Re: Text properties and FTGL

[Shai Ayal]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 5:51 AM, John Swensen <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Oct 28, 2008, at 10:23 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>
>> 2008/10/28 Thomas Weber <address@hidden>:
>>>
>>> Eh, adding TeX as dependency would be the end to all kind of usage
>>> pattern:
>>
>> Well, it wouldn't have to be a hard dependency. Make it a compile-time
>> option.  That seems to be the approach for many other of the larger
>> components of Octave. TeX is a standard part of a GNU system anyways.
>>
>>> using it on small machines
>>
>> A handheld calculator doesn't really need to produce
>> publication-quality plots anyways, does it?
>>
>> Also, I expect most people who use Octave already use LaTeX or TeX. Or
>> am I being naïve?
>>
>> - Jordi G. H.
>>
>
> I have a new alternate solution, that is probably more amenable to those who
> don't want to be tied to a specific toolkit.  It is a combination of a
> couple existing libraries.
>
> 1) balhtexml - This is the library used by MediaWiki (same as used by
> Wikipedia) to allow people to use LaTeX code inline with the web pages.
>  They also have a command line tool and a library that could easily be
> linked against directly.

I could not find this library on google. Could you provide a line?

> 2) gtkmathviewer - Despite having dependencies on GTK, the "core" of
> gtkmathviewer does not depend on GTK and could be ripped out and a simple
> render to a bitmap/pixmap could be done for inclusion into the OpenGL plots.

This looks nice but renders MathML, not LaTeX

> I think in the long run this will look less pretty than the LaTeX output,
> but seems simpler and dependent on less stuff.

I don't think we really need to be as pretty as LaTeX - I really think
having a small subset (greek, sub, super) is enough. It seems a wasted
effort to try and re-write LaTeX. If you really need very complex
LaTeX text on your plot, you can always use some ps+TeX trick:
I think we will use gl2ps to get postscript output from our OpenGL
code, and it supports combined ps+latex:

http://www.geuz.org/gl2ps/#tthFtNtAAB

i.e. you get 2 output files files -- a ps file with all the graphics
and a latex file which \includes the graphics and adds the text. This
way, on your hardcopy (but not on-screen) you can have true LaTeX
capabilities.

Shai