Re: Can't get TeX math to work

[Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 12:22 -0500, Yang wrote: 
> I've been trying more things over the past few days, to no avail. With 
> PGF, I get the exact same problem: the TeX is not being interpreted.
>
> Inspecting the output .tex, I see that Dia is explicitly quoting the $ 
> into \$. Why?

Because in a number of cases the actual size of the text is used to
determine the size of other things, like boxes around the text.  If the
TeX was unescaped, its size would be utterly unpredictable.

> How do I simply ask it to *not* do that?

By fixing bug #436135 :)  The simple solution is to make a new 'TeX'
object that has a boolean property "escaped", and have the TeX-oriented
renderers recognize that object and only escape those that have the
property set.  

The hard solution is to actually call out to TeX to get a render preview
that can be used to show the result and give a bounding box.

The strange solution would be to add a standard text property that's
hidden unless the user selects using TeX in the preferences.  However,
this wouldn't work with those objects that resize themselves based on
the text's size.

> IIRC from using Dia once many moons ago, I could somehow specify from 
> within Dia whether I wanted a certain text object to be rendered as TeX. 
> However, I can no longer find such options anywhere.

Hasn't been since at least 2000.

-Lars