Re: Text properties and FTGL

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Oct-2008, John Swensen wrote:

| 
| 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?

You might also look at the way the Emacs preview-latex mode works.
That doesn't rely on any special toolkit or widget (other than Emacs
ability to embed images in an Emacs buffer).  So we should be able to
do this in a reasonably portable way.  I would not want to link it too
closely to a particular toolkit or widget.

jwe