Feature suggestion, bug report -Re: [OS X TeX] Equation Service

Guido Mocken mocken at uni-freiburg.de
Fri Mar 22 11:31:42 CET 2002



Am Donnerstag den, 21. März 2002, um 19:59, schrieb Doug Rowland:
> I just wanted to let you know about a new OS X app I have written.  It's
> called "Equation Service" and it's a specialized front-end to pdflatex 
> meant
> for typesetting equations and small amounts of text.

For me it crashes when I try to typeset something like

\begin{eqnarray}
	a&=&b \\
	c&=&c
\end{eqnarray}

Gerben's GWTeXService at least reports an error:

! Undefined control sequence.
l.4 ^^I\begin
              {eqnarray}
?
! Emergency stop.

Which tells me that maybe I am doing something wrong (some package 
missing?!), but anyway - Equation Service shouldn't *crash* on this.

> The main feature of Equation Service is that it is a system service.  
> Any
> services-aware app that supports string output and PDF/TIFF input will 
> gain
> the ability to turn a highlighted string into a small typeset PDF from
> pdflatex.

This is already very nice, however I would like to suggest one 
additional feature that both your Equation Service and Gerben's 
GWTeXService lack so far:

Both provide a service "tex --> pdf". It would be very nice if they 
would also offer the reverse way: "pdf --> tex".
Of course, it's impossible to generate tex code for an arbitrary 
pdf-image, but maybe (I do not know the PDF specs for this) it would be 
possible to include the tex source as an invisible comment inside the 
resulting pdf when you do the tex --> pdf conversion. If so, to go the 
reverse way one would only have to extract this comment and return it as 
a text string to the calling application.

Is this feasable?

	Guido


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