Fancy Pants Formula Generator

This program starts a small Web server that allows you to edit LaTeX formulas in a text box and generate the associated PNG image from them. This allows you to embed mathematical equations in a word processing application that does not have a native equation editor, e.g. Apple Pages, the SocialText wiki, Microsoft Word if you forgot to install the Equation Editor and you're on a plane, etc.

Download

formula_editor

Screenshots

Screenshot of Chi-Square in Formula Generator

Documentation

To use this program, you simply execute it on a command line. It will then start a small Web server in the foreground which listens on the local machine on port 10000. Navigate to http://localhost:10000/formula and then start entering LaTeX formulas. That's it. Hit the "Generate" button to create a PNG image from the formula, which will appear over the text box in the refreshed page. You can adjust the size of the generated image via the "DPI" select box underneath the text box. Once you have an image you like, you can simply drag and drop it into another program (e.g. Pages, Word) or right-click and save it for upload to a website (e.g. SocialText).

Currently, the software can only handle one expression per image. Multiple expressions on multiple lines will cause it to blow up.

This script requires a number of software packages to be installed prior to use:

Ruby >= 1.8.2
teTeX >= 3.0
Ghostscript >= 6.52
NetPBM >= 9.24

It will write the generated PNG images into the current directory and then delete all *.png files upon exit. Because of this, its best to run it in an empty directory somewhere so as not to accidentally blow away a more important PNG image. I've been using a shell alias to accomplish this:

    machine:~> alias
    alias fe='pushd ~/fe; formula_editor; popd'
    machine:~>

No effort was made to ensure that this program would work under Microsoft Windows™, but I am willing to accept any patch towards that end. Or any other patch to fix a bug or enhance this, for that matter.