[texhax] Incorporating TeX into Custom-made Programs

[Darren Dale]

Hi Daniel,

On Thursday 16 February 2006 1:07 am, Daniel Wyckoff wrote:
> Dear TUG,
>
> I've searched for the last four hours for an answer to my question, and
> this is my last resort.  Sorry if I sound ignorant, but here goes:
>
> I'm devoting the rest of my life to making a very complicated educational
> program that runs through abstract mathematical proofs and displays visual
> aids.  Probably naively, I'm planning to write it in C and use OpenGL.
> Anyway, I need a way for the program to display mathematical symbols along
> with visualizations of the mathematical structures.  So, I need a way to
> display math symbols graphically on the screen.  I thought that somebody
> would have already written some library to achieve this, but I was wrong or
> just not thorough enough.  How do you suggest that I incorporate TeX
> symbols into a graphical C program?

The easy way to do this is to write a latex file to render the symbol(s) you 
want, (la)tex it, and use dvipng to create an image. Then you can draw that 
image to your screen.

The better way to do it may be to read the dvi file and use that information 
to lay the text out. I plan on looking into this route myself, using python, 
but it will be a longterm project.

Darren