On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 4:44 AM, John W. Eaton
<address@hidden> wrote:
On 13-Mar-2009, Shai Ayal wrote:
| Your code, if I understand correctly, uses pdfLaTeX to render the
| string. While this seems the ultimate solution (pdfLaTeX is a very
| good LaTeX renderer), it poses a bit of a problem in the context of
| the whole octave/backend paradigm:
| 1 If we put this code in the backend, than octave cannot compute text extents.
| 2 If we put this code in octave, than we have rendering in octave --
| i.e. octave will produce bitmaps
|
| maybe we should just go with the second choice and let octave produce
| bitmaps for text objects with renderer=LaTeX
|
| Another choice could be to split the text renderer from the general
| renderer, so we would have 2 types of backends: a graphics backend and
| a text backend, where the text backend would produce extents for
| octave and bitmaps for the graphics backend
We might want to borrow something from matplotlib, which currently has
a simplified TeX equation parser that uses the actual TeX algorithm
for glyph placement. See the file
http://matplotlib.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/matplotlib/trunk/matplotlib/lib/matplotlib/mathtext.py
As I understand it, they also allow full (pdf?)latex parsing so that
you can embed arbitrarily complex TeX blobs in the graphs if that's
what you want to do.
I also see that matplotlib comes with its own set of font metric files
and some .ttf font files.
jwe