[OS X TeX] TeX, OOo, NeoO (and Pages?)

[Maarten Sneep]

On 9 feb 2005, at 19:43, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> It's about <http://www.fyma.ucl.ac.be/wiki/~piroux/OOo+macro> using 
> TeX as an equation editor for OOWriter (the word processor part of 
> OpenOffice.org), a bit like the MathSetter QuarkXTension developed for 
> Quark XPress by Blue Sky TeX Systems, the makers of Textures. Sadly, 
> though, the equation is processed by TeX and converted on-the-fly to a 
> PNG picture by ImageMagick, then inserted inside the current OOWriter 
> document.
>
> Now what about somebody sometime developing a similar tool for the 
> insertion of equations inside Keynote and Pages document, using, since 
> Mac OS X and pdfTeX allows it, PDF instead of PNG? Of course, there's 
> still the drawback of treating equations as pictures, which makes 
> their subsequent editing impossible.

http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/EquationService/
http://evolve.lse.ac.uk/software/EquationEditor/

Is that good enough for you? I'm currrently playing a bit with such a 
system that uses a slightly more portable way of attaching the source 
of the equation to the resulting pdf, so two way interchange becomes 
possible, but the first one listed already does something similar (I 
prefer the UI of  the second though...). My version will hopefully also 
include the mathml translation, so that other applications have their 
export options. This is mainly though for use with OmniOutliner, but 
others could use the same trickery.

> What seems amazing in the provided screenshots is that the equations 
> have their baselines nicely aligned with the surrounding text, which 
> seems to indicate that, despite the equations being pictures, somebody 
> can still be done to make the alignment correct.

That is bloody hard, first of all getting that information out of 
(La)TeX, and then getting it in passable form into the pdf, and such 
that it will actually be used, is pretty hard. A combination of the 
right MediaBox, BoundingBox, &c might do it. I'm not going to try that 
right now.

Maarten

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