Hi Michael!
Thanks a lot for a thourough reply. I've CCed Saroj, the GSoC
applicant. I hope he'll succeed.
If you could mentor, that'd be great. Do you want to mentor officially
or unofficially? If officially, you need to be a PSF mentor (let me
know, I'll help
you do the administration). If unofficially, I can be the mentor and
you can help Saroj with the TeX part of his app.
Actually, if it's not a problem for you, I'd prefer the official way,
for example you can be a backup mentor. Also you'll get a google GSoC
t-shirt. :)
Ondrej
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> wrote:
> Well, that work has gone from a "paid to work on it" to a "hobby
> project", so it's harder to find the time.
>
> In terms of "math rendering" features, it's pretty complete. It's not
> 100% of TeX, and it never will be, but it's able to do most of the
> really common things.
>
> I would like to see this as an independent Python package. The pieces
> that are missing to do this are:
>
> Freetype wrappers: One could just extract the existing freetype wrappers
> in mpl. But that duplicates that code in two places, and those wrappers
> were built on a sort of "as needed" basis, and wouldn't be considered
> complete for any other purpose. (Maybe not a bad thing, though). The
> ctypes-based wrapper in pyglet is a candidate, but last time I looked,
> it's missing some features to extract the glyph metadata that mathtext
> needs. Plus, there always seem to be version mismatch problems with
> ctypes-based stuff, at least for me. I'd still love to see a proper C
> freetype wrapper as an independent project. PIL has a very basic one,
> that doesn't even come close to what we need -- but perhaps it's a
> starting point that could be extended.
>
> A basic bitmap rendering engine: It needs to be able to take the glyph
> buffers from freetype and blend them onto an image, as well as draw
> filled rectangles. So it doesn't need to be anything as full-blown as
> Agg, and could probably be built on top of numpy or PIL, or as a C
> extension, but pure Python ain't gonna cut it. This should then
> integrate with PILand/or pyglet to save PNG, JPEG files etc.
>
> Non-bitmap backends: These would be subsets of the matplotlib backends,
> but we would probably want the basic ability to write out PS, PDF and
> SVG etc. This is probably the biggest part of matplotlib that would
> need to be "pulled out", and the trickiest. It would still be useful to
> just have the "generic" vector description of the equations from
> mathtext and consider these backends as a secondary feature for later.
> An HTML backend that does glyph placement with CSS and Canvas would
> probably also be very useful for webpage output.
>
> So, that's a lot of work there, but it's all doable and should be fairly
> unsurprising. I'd be happy to unofficially help mentor someone doing a
> GSoC project on this, but I don't think I'll have time to do all of the
> work myself in the near future.
>
> Cheers,
> Mike
>
>
>
> Ondrej Certik wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > was there any new progress for the TeX engine since our last conversation?
> >
> > We got a GSoC application for SymPy, that (among other things) would
> > try to disentangle the TeX engine from matplotlib, so that it can be
> > easily used from other projects as well.
> >
> > What are your intentions with the engine - do you still hack on it, or
> > do you consider it more or less complete for your needs? I don't want
> > to have 2 incompatible engines in python - but if you are not going to
> > hack on it (much), then I think it makes sense to create a new project
> > for this and you can just include it. Because I think it's an
> > extremely cool and useful thing.
> >
> > And we want to have this in sympy too, because we have quite nice
> > ascii art printing, so having nice graphics printing is just a next
> > step.
> >
> > Ondrej
> >
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>
> --
> Michael Droettboom
> Science Software Branch
> Operations and Engineering Division
> Space Telescope Science Institute
> Operated by AURA for NASA
>
>