I am hoping someone here has some suggestions that I haven't tried. I need to generate formulas that look like this (pretend the brackets are solid scalable brackets):
[ something ] [ anything ] [ everything ] And pretend that the items in the stack are left justified and that the right and left brackets are whatever distance apart that they need to be to hold the largest text item. And I need to be able to specify a specific font. Also, the number of items in the stack will vary from one to eight. I should also add that no actual math or calculation is necessary. This is for print purposes only. I need the formulas as vector graphics. No bitmaps, please. Because print output will be to laser and raster images on lasers are generally ugly. OOo has a dandy Math module that creates these beautifully. However, it has so many bugs that it is currently unusable. (Yes, even 2.4.1 on Hardy.) Furthermore, you can use it to place the formula in an OOo document (e.g., Writer), but the only export option is PDF. I'd much prefer EPS or SVG because you can't easily place a PDF in another program. KFormula also has a nice little math editor that is in many ways even easier to use than OOo's math editor. However, it has even more bugs than OOo's math editor. It offers an EPS export option, but if you try it you get "unable to parse xml data." Ditto for its SVG export option. (I may pursue this further if I can't find anything better.) LyX creates dandy formulas, but if I want them in a specific font I can get them out of LyX only in PDF format. Why the problem with PDF, you ask? Because I really need the formulas as individual graphics. I can export anything that I can print to PDF with CUPS-PDF. But to convert that to a vector graphic does not seem possible. I could use pdf2ps and then convert the PS. But pdf2ps rasterizes the PDF. No more scaling for that image. Scribus can take LaTeX code and generate a formula from it. Works a treat, except that the output is a bitmap and you have your choice of only three fonts, and only the regular-italic versions. I should add that I am not faulting Linux here. There are only three packages that I know of on Windows that can do what I want, and they are all outrageously expensive (InDesign, FrameMaker and Ventura). And two of them are in a rest home. It may not be possible to do what I want, but I thought I'd ask anyway. Any suggestions welcome. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
