Re: wysiwig TeX in dia

[Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille chepelov org>]

Le Wed, Jun 19, 2002, à 05:43:07AM -0700, James Michael DuPont a écrit:


> The XPDF only contains an PDF interpreter, 
> I was thinking about using that for building an PDF
> import into DIA, but I dont think I explained myself
> very well.


Oh, now I understand. What you were talking about was: modifying XPDF's
abstraction of a renderer, so that it would output into a format understood
by Dia (ideally, dia's format). Where did I store my brain ? I have been
specially stupid in this thread :-(


> Once you get your TEX into PS or eps, then the Dia
> seems to have a EPS and DXF import
>
> PS converter to convert the diagram to DFX
> http://home.t-online.de/home/helga.glunz/wglunz/pstoedit/


Currently, dia has no EPS import (and I don't see that being available
anytime soon). It does have some DXF import, however, this code is quite
fragile and might require some tuning to the routine you point to.

Assuming the EPS->DXF converter is solid enough to handle the task, it
should be possible do so something.

(one alternative idea might be to find/modify something to have an EPS->SVG
converter. Or even better, an SVG output module for Ghostscript. Once the
TeX file is converted to SVG, it should be possible to modify the shapes'
SVG import routine in order to render by dia. Basically, the TeX object
would be a shape whose visual contents depend on the output of a TeX process)

Another alternative; there are TeX -> MathML converters out there. Can
MathML be transformed into SVG via XSLT ? (uh, not likely. What does Mozilla
do ?). If yes, then the problem is (almost) solved.

All in all, this looks like a very valuable feature, with fun problems to
solve.

        -- Cyrille


-- 
Grumpf.