[SciPy-user] typeset math

[John Hunter]

>>>>> "Edin" == Edin Salkovi§ <edin.salkovic at gmail.com> writes:

    Edin> Then I saw (literally) what John has managed to do - it's
    Edin> just great.  I deffinitely don't want to reinvent the wheel,
    Edin> but I realy think that this stuff should be put in a
    Edin> separate library so: 1) other projects can use it (if they
    Edin> want to).  2) it can be easy for others to use it (see 1) 3)
    Edin> John can use it :) without having to develop and maintain it
    Edin> 4) other developers can join the project more easily

If you want to work on a new/better/freestanding version of mathtext
for SOC, I'm happy to be an unoffical mentor, though I think I long
missed the deadline to apply to be an official mentor.  I'm suspect
Robert/enthought would be willing to officially mentor the project.

There are several things that need to be done to improve mathtext,
roughly in order of importance

  * replace the bakoma truetype fonts with a set of good,
    comprehensive, math fonts, eg, STIX.  These aren't out yet but are
    due real soon, really, they mean it this time <wink>.  But you
    could at least refactor the code to make it easy to plug in any
    font set, using unicode names for symbols where available, so that
    plugging in STIX would be easy when it is ready.  And it is
    supposed to be out by this simmer.

  * use the Knuth layout algorithms

  * refactor it into a stand-alone module

  * add support for kerning - I took at stab at this but gave up when
    I realized that the bakoma fonts do not have kerning info in
    them.  Arggg.

  * improve the parser to handle more TeX

  * add support for more layouts, eg arrays and fractions


JDH