Hello,

I frequently use Inkscape for making scientific posters and presentations (with
Jessyink), and of course, I need to include equations in those. There are
several tools to incorporate Latex equations in Inkscape, but I find them not
very satisfying. No need to convince you TeXmacs users that when it comes to
maths, 2D what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing is much more natural than
entering serialized code, and that TeXmacs is just awesome for that.


So, inspired by one of the Latex-Inkscape extensions (textext.ink), I have
hacked a way to incorporate svg re-editable images of TeXmacs equations into
Inkscape (the svg code embeds the TeXmacs code for re-edition). As a result I
now have an open-source wysiwyg equation editor producing perfect vector
graphics, in some sense comparable to what the non-free mathtype program
delivers in windows. The work flow is the simplest possible :


-From Texmacs you can copy-paste equations to Inkscape (a custom copy, though)


-in Inkscape you can re-edit any selected equation via an item in the extension
menu: it launches Texmacs in which you can change wathever you want to your
equation, and when you're done a single click quits texmacs and updates the
Inkscape content. If no equation was selected this process will create a new
one.


-not sure it will be so useful but I made it two-ways compatible with the
textext inkscape plugin for those that were previously using that.


Like I said, my solution is really a hack. It involves a couple of c++ patches
for TeXmacs, scheme and python scripts and calling binary graphics converters.
So setting it up is a little bit of work (you must be willing to compile
TeXmacs), but in the end it works very simply and smoothly. I have it running
on Ubuntu systems, but I believe it should run on any other linux distro with
essentially no change. As for windows and macs, I guess that it could also work
with minor adaptations. If anyone is interested I can provide the code and
instructions.

best,
Philippe


PS. This scheme can obviously can be adapted for use with other scriptable
applications capable of displaying svg images, like Scribus. It would also be
usable with LibreOffice/OpenOffice if only they were able to render svg
correctly...