Re: TeX equations to SVG

Bård wrote:
> I’ve been looking into the details of the “customize.xxe”-system. We 
> would like to replace the PNG output from texmathtoimg.bat with SVG. The 
> reason is that SVG renders much better in a browser, in particular when 
> users zoom. It is also easier to scale the image using the viewport 
> scale settings.
> 
> So the idea is to modify the texmathtoimg.bat to cater for SVG output 
> using dvisvgm from https://dvisvgm.de <https://dvisvgm.de>

If you download and install (using XXE's "Options|Install Add-ons") the 
add-on  alled "A sample customize.xxe" (see 
https://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/addons_doc.html#sample_customize_xxe), 
you'll find in directory XXE_user_prefs_dir/addon/sample_customize_xxe/

customize.xxe

and

imagetoolkits.incl

and

texmathtoimg
texmathtoimg.bat

The  <imageToolkit name="TeX Math"> found in imagetoolkits.incl invokes 
shell script/BAT script texmathtoimg.

---
   <imageToolkit name="TeX Math">
     <description>Converts TeX mathematics to PNG, EPS, PDF.
Important: requires Ghostscript 8+.</description>

     <converter>
       <!-- First line of the TeX file must be "%tex" if you want to be able
            to embed base64-encoded ``TeX images'' in your documents. -->

       <input extensions="tex" magicStrings="%tex"/>
       <output extensions="png eps ps pdf"/>

       <shell command='"%C%Stexmathtoimg" "%I" "%O"' platform="Unix"/>

       <shell command='call "%C%Stexmathtoimg.bat" "%I" "%O"'
              platform="Windows"/>
     </converter>
   </imageToolkit>
---

You should modify the above <imageToolkit> to suit your needs, for example:

0) First of all, pleas make sure to uncomment in 
sample_customize_xxe/customize.xxe.
--
   <include location="imagetoolkits.incl" />
--

1) Replace
<output extensions="png eps ps pdf"/>
by
<output extensions="svg"/>

2) Replace the invocations of texmathtoimg by the invocations of a shell 
script/BAT script of your own leveraging dvisvgm.

We have not tested this specifc <imageToolkit> for a very long time 
because we don't have TeX installed on our development Linux boxes but 
we don't see why this would not work. After all SVG is accepted 
everywhere PNG is.

- The reference documentation of <imageToolkit> is found here:

https://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/configure/imageToolkit.html

- The reference documentation of customize_xxe is found here:

https://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/configure/bindings_generic.html

The above chapter is about custom bindings but Ffle customize.xxe may 
also be used to specify parameterGroup, imageToolkit, etc, properties.





> 
> However, looking at imagetoolkits.incl and texmathtoimg.bat we cannot 
> figure out where the extension .png comes from when bat-script is 
> executed. It seems that .png extension is hard-coded for WebHelp output, 
> is this correct? 

No. This would be a bug.



> We tried to modify the “outputformat” in the attributes 
> of the imageobject, but it doesn't seem to be working.

@outputformat is an "effectivity attribute". See 
https://tdg.docbook.org/tdg/5.2/ref-elements#common.effectivity.attributes

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