[OS X TeX] LaTeXiT

[Maarten Sneep]

On 17 May 2005, at 15:56, Pierre Chatelier wrote:


>>> -About the baseline problem : I disagree to call it a problem.
>>>
>
> <snip>
>
>
>> If you think of LaTeXiT not with respect to TeX, but as an  
>> equation editor to be used in conjunction with standard word  
>> processing software  <snip> then the baseline correction is indeed  
>> crucial:
>> For example, there's an OOo macro package called OOoLaTeXEquation  
>> <http://www.fyma.ucl.ac.be/wiki/~piroux/OOo+macro> doing this for  
>> OpenOffice.org.
>>
>
> Okay, but it's not clear for me who's doing what. In my opinion,  
> the equation generator (LEE, LaTeXiT...) must produce a PDF with  
> information attached, so that the context application (OO,  
> Pages...) will be able to tweak it a little. But the PDF generator  
> does not mind about future placement, it is totally external to its  
> work.
>

No, not exactly: you'd need to provide the wanted information in a  
form that _can_ contain this information. RTFD comes to mind. This  
rtfd pasteboard would be a wrapper around the pdf, and includes the  
\raisebox{-\depth}{\includegraphics{...}} bit (if I were to write the  
lot in LaTeX ;-)


> So the baseline problem is rather a feature of an "importer", that  
> can either be a macro, a smart Drag'n drop pasteboard or anything  
> else, but not the PDF generator itself. And so far, I have  
> absolutely no idea about a way to tell an application : "when I  
> drop there a PDF from LaTeX, just shift it to the baseline". And  
> such a behaviour has no reason to be overloadable in any  
> application. No ?
>

With the rtfd this would be possible. Now, getting this to work  
properly is far from trivial, and requires a lot of work and testing.  
I really would hate to see this effort duplicated in some shape or form.

Now, how and why the OOo+macro even works, I have no idea. It is also  
limited to a coarse bounding box, which may be to coarse for use in  
normal text (it also uses bitmapped images, a limitation of OOo). In  
addition, a lowered item, may cause the next line to shift down,  
leading to irregularly spaced lines. Some care is needed.

Maarten
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