FormuLaTeX – LaTeX in XSLidy

FormuLaTeX – LaTeX in XSLidy Philippe Cattin, Erik Wilde ETH Zürich July 2006 FormuLaTeX Introduction Motivation 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 $y=x^2$, are dynamically rescaled with the font size

Multiple occurances of the same \LaTeX content such as $x$ and $x$ 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 LaTeX 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

extender.xsl: pass generates the .html files as well as the .tex files with the formulas

formulatex.pl: generates the PNG/GIF files for all the formulas as well as the scaling and baseline information (.sex files)

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

Using FormuLaTeX 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 $x$ and $y$ appear properly aligned. Samples 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: $y=x^2$

24pt: $y=x^2$

32pt: $y=x^2$

48pt: $y=x^2$

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>

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

Installation 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