Make use of Latex whenever HTMl fails

Latex, as an scriptable Text formating tool provides ways to print math, chemical formulas, Music notes, diagramms and many more. All these feature are implementet in Mediawiki already as $$, and so on.

These seem to be must have features for science related wikis.

Idea for such a Plugin:

• provide xml-commands like mediawiki (compatible with mediawiki ?) like $\backslash int\_0^t\; \backslash frac\{1\}\{t\}dt$ and so on, where the Latex code is between the xml tags and the code is shipped to a TeX system which provides the image to show inside the web page.

This is one view why Latex is importent. However there is a different one - the whole TeX/Latex Community has no general site for isself yet, and there are ideas to have something like a selflatex site (similar to selfhtml). Unfortunately there is no software yet to provide all the functunality necessary to start such a web project.

Ideas for such a plugin/addon sytem:

Plugins

• It is necessary to show Latex code, show in an image how these specific line look like in the result - shown as png, or pdf. Additionally it should provide the whole Latex Code to create this object in case of examples that spread over more than one page.
• Make a plugin xml object which referenzes an exsisting object link. These object includes the code, the result and an link to the edit page for the code. Thus the code (which could become really large for long pages> should not be displayed inside the wiki.
• Make an addon, that provided these texobjects. Thus it needs its own edit site, should provide errors in compilation and so on.

Clear what I mean ?

-- MatthiasPospiech - 24 Oct 2004

Did you have looks at the LaTeXToMathMLPlugin and the MathModePlugin ?

-- FranzJosefSilli - 24 Oct 2004

No I did not see it, however that is quite restricted - to the ability of the browser and the MathML language, whereas Latex itsself is not restricted. And with the package 'preview' for Latex you can extract anything very easy as an image.

Additionaly this is reststricted to math - but there are many other possible thing, like chemistry, feynman diagrammss, plots and many more.

But most Important - that does not help us to show the result of a Latex documents in a picture whithin the browser at all...

Matthias

-- MatthiasPospiech - 25 Oct 2004