Re: Text properties and FTGL

[John Swensen]

On Oct 26, 2008, at 12:31 AM, Shai Ayal wrote:

> 2. How to make it generic enough that in the future we can incorporate
> some TeX parsing

Do you have any ideas on how to do the TeX parsing?  Do you intend to  
develop your own renderer, or use existing tools like pdflatex?  I  
messed around for a few hours last night with the following sequence  
of events:

1) Run an equation string through pdflatex
2) Read in the resulting pdf with the poppler library
3) Render the pdf onto a cairo graphics context.
(this is how it is done in the little utility pdf2svg except they  
write the graphics context to an SVG file with a cairo SVG context  
instead of displaying it to the screen.)

I found a library that allows you to render onto a cairo context and  
then copy the cairo surface into an OpenGL texture and then draw it.   
I couldn't this to work in conjunction with steps (1)-(3).  I can run  
the examples from http://www.cairographics.org/OpenGL/ and I can draw  
to a simple cairo based GTK widget, but I can't seem to get the two to  
work together.

Is there some other easier way of rendering LaTeX equations to OpenGL?

John Swensen