Re: tlug: MagicPoint and math

[David Dibben <dibben@example.com>]

On 29-May-98 Manuel Chakravarty wrote:
>> David Dibben <dibben@example.com> wrote,
>> > I didn't manage to get the ps2gif script that comes with latex2html to
>> > produce a gif file that magic point would work with (but I didn't try very
>> > hard.) Doing it manually, tex -> dvi -> ps -> ppm -> gif worked fine.
>> > Using
>> > the pnmcrop tool on the ppm file to leave only the equation. The equation
>> > can then be included as a normal image into the magic point presentation.
>> > I am sure that it will be relatively simple to write a script that
>> > can do all of this automatically. 
>>
>> Correction: the ps2gif script does work, something seemed to be broken on my
>> system. Also, since the images produced by latex2html are
>> transparent gifs the the background shows through.
> 
> I would still not be really happy with this.  Including some
> equations into a .mgp file and writing a script to pipe them
> thtough TeX and convert them into a .gif, is a start, but on
> the other hand, I usually have a big bunch of preamble
> definitions in my LaTeX files, so formatting individual
> equations is not enough.

latex2html produces a separate image file for each equation even if they come
from the same latex file. You could run your single file through latex2html to
produce all the images rather than doing them individually. This is still a
bit messy though.
 
> The ideal thing might be something like a special LaTeX
> style and a tool, which allows you to write your
> presentation completely in LaTeX and then generate an .mpg
> file (and a bunch of .gifs) from it.  This would also allow
> you to make use of other LaTeX packages.  For example, I do
> all my figures with PSTricks these days.  Overall, you would 
> get something like `latex2mgp', but with the restriction
> that you have to you use this special style file.
> 
> `latex2html' is written in Perl, isn't it?  

Yes.

> One problem is that markup in .mpg is quite simple (as far as I saw), so it 
> might be a bit difficult to convert some of the LaTeX stuff
> into .mpg...


I agree that a `latex2mgp' would be very nice, and I also agree that it would be
far from trivial to do. One possiblity would be to take a similar approach to
latex2html and convert the latex to a gif (or jpeg) file whenever there is no
direct way to convert from latex to mgp. In this way you could still do your
figures in PSTricks and get the script to convert them to a gif. 



David

---
Dr. David Dibben
National Food Research Institute
2-1-2 Kannondai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8642. Japan
Tel:  0298 38 8029           
Fax: 0298 38 8122
E-Mail: dibben@example.com
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