math formulas in Dia

[Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe (àààà ààààà ààààààààààà) <sameerds gmail com>]

On Fri, 17 Apr 2009, Lars wrote:

> What you're doing wrong is to assume that Dia talks to LaTeX to figure
> out the size the LaTeX formulas will be after they've been rendered.
> Absent that, we have to make LaTeX output exactly the text given, not
> its LaTeX rendering. The way to change it is either to add a preference
> or LaTeX output option for whether to escape LaTeX formulas, or (better)
> make a new object that can contain LaTeX text and render it for size, or
> (best) make text handling in general allow each piece of text to be
> LaTeX and handled accordingly.

Hello,

I have been wondering about getting math formulas into Dia diagrams...
its an itch that has been, well, itching for a long long time. I have
found two ways of doing this:

1. Externally call on TeX or LaTeX to process chunks of text, which is
the way Inkscape seems to have taken in the form of two plugins ---
TexText and InkLaTeX. I don't know how effective these plugins are,
since I have never used Inkscape.

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ExtensionsRepository#Extensions

2. Use the GtkMathView object maintained outside of the Gtk+ sources.
Abiword seems to have taken this approach.

http://msevior.livejournal.com/26377.html

Of these, I like second approach since it does not put a dependency on
LaTeX or its cousins. The GtkMathView widget seems to be stable,
although its bugzilla seems idle. But given that Abiword is using
GtkMathView, its quite likely that the widget won't just die away or
something --- it might even end up in some future version of Gtk...

Has anyone else given any thought recently towards supporting math
formulas in Dia? Using either LaTeX or MathML...

Sameer.
-- 
http://sameer.sbuddhe.net/