[tug-summer-of-code] Working on a TeX Project for the Google Summer of Code 2008 (MathTran)

[Jonathan Fine]

Hello Cesar

I'm glad you're interested in contributing to the MathTran project. 
First, a word about
   http://www.lawebdefisica.com/software/latextest.php.

This page offers a data entry screen and preview similar to
   http://www.mathtran.org
except that MathTran responds much more quickly.  It can do this because 
it runs TeX as a daemon.  User supplied data is not to be trusted, and 
MathTran uses the 'secure plain' variant of plain TeX.

To write a secure format with the power of LaTeX would be a lot of work, 
and I think too difficult at this time for GSOC.  And there are lots of 
new useful things that MathTran can do right now, with a little work.

MathTran also returns the log file, and making that more useful is an 
interesting problem.

I've just now put up on MathTran a demo.  The source is on Google code.
     http://www.mathtran.org/toys/mathtran-javascript/jfine/editor.html

Over the next couple of months I'll be developing this further, so your 
GSOC application would be for a moving target.  I suggest you write 
about what you'd do if you were starting now (so we can get a sense of 
your grasp of the project) and where you'd like the project to be (not 
all with your own work) by the end of year or thereabouts (so we can get 
a sense of the direction you want to go in).

I think there's a lot of scope, within MathTran JavaScript, for 
improving what the server returns.  For example, perhaps it should 
return JSON data for AJAX and similar use.  But I'd like the main focus 
to be on improving the user experience, as prototyped in the toy editor 
above.

I agree with you, write for Firefox first and IE (and other browsers) 
later.  But I think later should be no longer than one month.  In other 
words, a priority NOW is to get the toy editor working on IE.

Do you know about bookmarklets?  There's a couple in 
toys/mathtran-javascript/bookmarklet.  Why don't you give them a test.

Finally, you might like to look at my blog:
     http://jonathanfine.wordpress.com

best regards and thank you for your interest


Jonathan