[texhax] Incorporating TeX into Custom-made Programs

[Karl Berry]

Hello Daniel,

    How do you suggest that I incorporate TeX symbols 
    into a graphical C program?

Displaying individual symbols would be doable by simply using the
freetype library to read the TeX math fonts and display characters from
them.  However, I imagine you actually need to typeset significant
mathematical equations/formulas, which is a much harder problem.

The other replies mostly suggested creating a (La)TeX document and
processing it into a png/pdf/whatever, and displaying that.  That seems
like the most expedient solution to me too.

However, I wanted to mention the (much) more difficult but (much) more
efficient solution of typesetting the math yourself.  The algorithm is
described in Appendix G of the TeXbook, and of course the source is in
tex.web.  It was also reimplemented in C++ by Luca Padovani for his
GtkMathView project, which applies TeX math typesetting to MathML input.
http://helm.cs.unibo.it/mml-widget/

By the way, we'd certainly welcome an article on your project (or the
others people have mentioned in this thread) for TUGboat, when the time
is appropriate.  (http://tug.org/TUGboat)

Happy mathing,
karl