Re: Metapost - text alignment

[christian ridderstrom gmail com]

On Sat, 27 Jan 2007, Rob McDonald wrote:

> For example, DIA doesn't know how to calculate the width of the 
> following string.
>
> $c^2=a^2+b^2$

Sorry for butting on this thread, but it just struck me that maybe MimeTeX 
would be of interest to Dia?

        http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html

I've actually used it for wiki pages so that embedding $c^2=a^2+b^2$ 
results in a GIF-image with that formula. MimeTeX doesn't need a LaTeX 
installation, it's got its own (simple) renderer. The additional wiki 
stuff caches the mapping of '$c^2=a^2+b^2$' to .gif, so it's only 
generated once and therefore quick

Anyway, maybe this could be useful for Dia. One use could be to get a 
rough idea of the size of a formula. Another idea could be to let Dia 
embed formulas inside drawings by incorporating MimeTeX.

If MimeTeX isn't good, there might be other simple renderers that could be 
used for this purpose.

cheers
/christian

--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr