I don't know what one assumes by "LaTeX formula input", but there already is a working extension that does this in Inkscape (eqtexsvg.py). At least I'm happily using it on Windows. You can find it under Effects::Render:: LaTeX formula. However, it does have few dependencies (latex, dvips and pstoedit), but it does what it's suppose to do.

Of course this could be improved, most notably:
- you can not set the size of the text (it seams to depend on the canvas size)
- you can not edit the equation since it's converted to curves (maybe that could be made by storing (La)TeX code into some XML attribute which would be called upon double click)
- maybe try to reduce dependencies to use dvisvgm (http://dvisvgm.sourceforge.net/)

Other than that you can render whole fragment of text with it, but it converts everything to curves.

If there's is some help, Scribus development versions also include rendering of (La)TeX code. If one wants to remove all the dependencis (so that you shouldn't have (La)TeX installed at all), maybe someone from matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/) could help since that library has some kind of internal rendering of TeX code.

I'm not a developer, so I can't help with coding, but maybe these comments will be of some help to someone.

Best regards,
Rok

2009/4/3 Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk.pl@...400...>


Anton Litvinov wrote:
>
> 6) facilitate users with TeX-formulas input (Abiword guys already have
> this)
>
This is a very big project in itself: we would need to call pdflatex,
convert the embedded fonts to SVG fonts and finally import the text. SVG
font support seems to be the big thing here. Once this gets in, it might be
implemented as an extension.
Abiword does this he half-baked way by just implementing a (La)TeX formula
parser and doing the layout in the application. I don't think this is what
the users want. They want the excellent output quality of TeX, not just a
way to enter equations.

I think idea 1 is equivalent to kerning.
I second idea 2, I run into a need for this a few times already, and I ended
up creating a new text object.

I'd look into the following advanced text features before going full-out on
TeX:
- vertical alignment of flowed text in th frame
- automatic hyphenation - this would be just wonderful to have!
- mouse based editing of text-on-path starting point and kerning - this is
very important as well.
- paragraph indent (this can be emulated with kerning, but the indent has to
be set manually for each paragraph)
- paragraph spacing (ditto)
- frame chaining (text flows in one frame and when it's full it continues in
another)
- resize to fill (adjust font size so that the text fills the frame; needs
automatic hyphenation)

Regards, Krzysztof Kosiński
--
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