FormuLaTeX – LaTeX in XSLidy

FormuLaTeX Introduction

Philippe Cattin, Erik Wilde
ETH Zürich

July 2006

Outline

Motivation (3)
Using FormuLaTeX (2)
Samples (4)
Installation (2)

FormuLaTeX

For many scientific presentations and lectures a means to render formulas is required
FormuLaTeX is what ↗ TeXPoint is for ↗ PowerPoint and ↗ OOoLatex for ↗ OpenOffice but only better
It allows you to easily integrate $\LaTeX$ -formulas or LaTeX snippets into any xslidy presentation
FormuLaTeX uses the powerfull and flexible extension mechanism of xslidy

Advantages of FormuLaTeX

You can use all the power of $\LaTeX$ in your xslidy presentations
FormuLaTeX scales the formulas and adjusts the baseline automatically and transparently for the user
The formulas, such as , are dynamically rescaled with the font size
Multiple occurances of the same $\LaTeX$ content such as and are transparently collapsed to one single PNG/GIF image
FormuLaTeX renders PNG/GIF images of the $\LaTeX$ content with transparency set correctly
FormuLaTeX uses a sophisticated caching mechanism to avoid the regeneration of already processed formulas

Disadvantages of FormuLaTeX

Some characters in the code have to be escaped as to not interfere with XML, e.g. & has to be replaced by & and <> by < and > respectively
FormuLaTeX is a 3-pass process
1. extender.xsl: pass generates the .html files as well as the .tex files with the formulas
2. formulatex.pl: generates the PNG/GIF files for all the formulas as well as the scaling and baseline information (.sex files)
3. extender.xsl: the second pass re-generates the html files with the correct scaling and baseline information
FormuLaTeX requires perl, perl-magick, ghostscript and a working $\LaTeX$ installation

Outline

Motivation (3)
Using FormuLaTeX (2)
Samples (4)
Installation (2)

Syntax

The simple syntax of the FormuLaTeX extension:

<tex pkg="">LaTeX-Code</tex>

The optional pkg="" attribute contains a comma separated list of packages that are required to process the $\LaTeX$ content
The $\LaTeX$ -Code can be anything from single letters to complex formulas
Ampersands & in the $\LaTeX$ syntax must be replaced by &
< and > must be replaced by < and > respectively

Entering LaTeX Code

Using FormuLaTeX is very easy. The following code snippet

<tex>$x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$</tex>

for example yields a detailed $\LaTeX$ rendering of the

Quadratic equation: $x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$

You don't have to fuzz around with scaling and positioning the image correctly. FormuLaTex scales the formulas correctly and even handles the baseline settings fully automatically, so that

and

appear properly aligned.

Outline

Motivation (3)
Using FormuLaTeX (2)
Samples (4)
Installation (2)

Example 1 with Changing Font Size

As the equation height is bound to the height of the letter 'x', the size of the equations changes with font size:

16pt:
24pt:
32pt:
48pt:

Example 2 with Packages and Special Characters

The following code snippet

<tex pkg="amsmath">$f(x,y)=\begin{bmatrix}
f(0,0) & f(0,1) & \cdots & f(0,M-1)\\
f(1,0) & \ddots &        & f(1,M-1)\\
\vdots &        & \ddots & \vdots\\
f(N-1,0) & f(N-1,1) & \cdots & f(N-1,M-1)\\
\end{bmatrix}$</tex>

is rendered as
$f(x,y)=\begin{bmatrix}f(0,0)&f(0,1)&\cdots&f(0,M-1)\\f(1,0)&\ddots&&f(1,M-1)\\\vdots&&\ddots&\vdots\\f(N-1,0)&f(N-1,1)&\cdots&f(N-1,M-1)\\\end{bmatrix}$

Example 3 with Background

As the generated PNG/GIF images use transparency, there is no problem with potential background colours and background images.

$s=\int_0^{n}\frac{1}{x}dx$

The faint background image can be clearly seen behind the formula.

Example 4 Colour

The formulatex can even generate GIF/PNG images using colour.

<tex pkg="color">\[{\cal F}\{f(x,y)\}=F(u,v)=\color{red}\frac{1}{N}\color{black}\sum_{x=0}^{N-1}\sum_{y=0}^{N-1}f(x,y)e^{-\mbox{j} 2\pi (ux+vy/N)}\]</tex>

${\calF}\{f(x,y)\}=F(u,v)=\color{red}\frac{1}{N}\color{black}\sum_{x=0}^{N-1}\sum_{y=0}^{N-1}f(x,y)e^{-\mbox{j}2\pi(ux+vy/N)}$

Outline

Motivation (3)
Using FormuLaTeX (2)
Samples (4)
Installation (2)

Installation

Installation is pretty simple

Copy the extender.xsl into your top-level directory and unzip formulatex (see this documentation for an example).
Verify, that all the prerequisites for formulatex.pl are installed:
- A working $\LaTeX$ installation
- Perl with the modules Image::Magick, Digest::MD5, and Files::Copy
- ghostscript

Processing FormuLaTeX Presentations

The following commands show how to generated the documentation for the formulatex documentation:

saxon formulatex.xml extender.xsl
formulatex/formulatex.pl
saxon formulatex.xml extender.xsl