[Ipe-discuss] External formula editors

[Jan Hlavacek]

On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 14:59 +0100, Otfried Cheong wrote:
> Jan Hlavacek wrote:
>> She uses IPE on Windows, and there is a windows program called TeXAide,

> A slight shortcut is possible:  Create your formula with TeXAide, then 
> press Ctrl+A Ctrl+C (select all, and copy to clipboard).  Switch to Ipe, 
> and press Ctrl+V.  Ipe will automatically create a text object, and  place
> it in the middle of the canvas - you only have to move it into the  right
> position.  This isn't too bad, I guess, considering how much mouse  work
> it takes to assemble an equation in the editor anyway...

Thanks!  This is at least some speed-up, as long as the middle of the
canvas is visible.  When I tried it first, my drawing was zoomed in such
a way that the middle of canvas was not visible, and I did not notice
that the equation gets pasted in. 

> Note that you have to start TeXAide only once - just keep it running for 
> the entire Ipe session.  You have to set the "Format" to "Inline
> Equation" in TeXAide for the formula to work in Ipe (again this needs to 
> be done only once for an Ipe session).

That's correct.  I wish TeXAide would save the "inline equation" setting
between sessions.

>> I think it would be nice if there was a way to hook applications like
>> that to IPE, so that you would have a new button on a toolbar, that
>> would allow you to launch such application directly from IPE, and
>> automatically include the created latex equation in the drawing.
> 
> It doesn't seem that TeXAide exposes any interface that Ipe could use to 
> make this more easy.

True.  I didn't realize at first that there is no way of getting the
equation from TeXAide other than cut and paste.  And of course the
source isn't available.  Nice example why free software is so much
better.

By  the way, the colleague I was talking about wrote her 300 pages
dissertation in graph theory in LaTeX.  It had few hundred
illustrations, that were all created in ... IPE 5!  Apparently, there
weren't that many formulas, and the ones that were there involved mostly
complicated subscripts and superscripts and fractions. She didn't use
LaTeX for years.  She is now rather addicted to word, but she still
likes to create her figures in IPE.

-- 
Jan Hlavacek <jhlavace at svsu.edu>
Saginaw Valley State University