Felix Breuer wrote:
Hello Inkscape Hackers!
I have a couple of questions:
In general: Does the planned plugin architechture of Inkscape allow for rendering plugins, i.e. plugins that render new/custom/other tags in the SVG document (embedded via the foreignObject tag)?
More specifically: I would really like a MathML rendering plugin. Does your (planned) plugin architechture allow for such a thing?
If it does, my suggestion is the following: GtkMathView [1] is a very mature MathML rendering engine which provides a) a GTK rendering widget, b) a C++ interface for rendering MathML and, most importantly, a Bonobo component. For details see [1]. It might be possible to use this to render MathML formulas inside pictures/diagramms created with Inkscape without too much implementation effort (?).
One issue with this is that gtkmathview doesn't respect transparency or affine transforms. This means that if you rotate a math object, or put something behind it, it will look ugly.
Possibly a better approach would be to get the appropriate subsystem to place glyphs on the canvas directly this would have the added advantage of being able to convert to paths, and allow the same fonts as other text in inkscape.
Personally I found mathml an abbomiation to work with, if anything I'd like the entry to be as latex :)
Related problems include music typesetting (lilypond) and simple visual languages.
njh