[OS X TeX] LaTeXiT

[Pierre Chatelier]

Hello,

I am the author of LaTeXiT; Maarten Sneep told me that it would be a 
good idea for me to suscribe here; indeed, it is the least I can do.
Just to start with ideas about future improvements in LEE's, Equation 
service or  LaTeXiT :

-So far, I think that calling latex, dvips and ps2pdf is slow, but it 
is the only reliable and portable way to get a scaled image with a 
correct bounding box. I have experimented to put some \mag commands 
into LaTeX source code, but it is very disappointing. About the bouding 
box, I do not know how to compute one by myself; but if somebody knows 
that, this could be a first step to get rid of dvips.
-To attach latex source code to a PDF, Marteen has talked about pdftk. 
In my opinion, it is a problem to use a tool that is not usually 
packaged with LaTeX (for example, pdfcrop, that could be used to 
compute a bounding box, is not distributed with the LaTeX from Fink. 
So, I foresee to release new versions of LaTeXiT that would rather use 
the PDFKit of MacOS 10.4. On one hand, this is portable; on the other 
hand, it is Tiger only...
-About the baseline problem : I disagree to call it a problem. It is 
just up to the user to align the *image* he has generated with its 
text. I really do not see which assumptions  could be made about the 
context... But it may just be a less of knowledge of my part; in fact I 
do use some context information for the LaTeXiT service : when the text 
to replace is in RTF format, I get the font size to deduce some 
scaling, so that the PDF image is already at a proper size

Any thoughts ?

Regards,
Pierre

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