[texhax] Using TeX tool in application

Piotr Turkowski pturkowski at gmail.com
Fri May 30 21:01:11 CEST 2008


Hello,
i'm writing to you, because it's quite hard to preceise to whom to
write with my issue.

My name's Piotr Turkowski, i'm a student and i come from Poland. I'm
working on pretty advanced project, which in the end will give an
engineering tool to calculate structures made of reinforced concrete,
and if this will work, there will be probably one more for steel
constructions. The program will be platform independant by using Qt4
platform, and as a result it will generate raport from its
calculations and as you probably feel - it will contain a lot of
equations. Therefore i've decided to use TeX as a tool to make those
equtions look good. I plan to write simple *.tex files and convert
them to pdf. I dont know yet if it will be possible to do it like: tex
-> pdf, or tex -> dvi -> ps ->pdf, or any other way - the final result
has to be a pdf file. This is dictated by the platform and program
indepent policy which i try to input on the project. PDF being the
most spred exchange file format is the most suitable solution for me.

My question is: is it possible to include tools like dvips or pdfTeX
in this project ? What i need is to link them directly in my
application or have them as a small command line tool, which will be
called after generating .tex file, either way is okay, but this
program has to be distributed with the program i'm working on. Meaning
it can't be required by program, it has to provide it, so the end-user
will not need to take care of it.

The program is going to be open source, licenced (most probably) under
GNU/GPL v3 and it's going to be written in C++. It's going to be my
master's thesis in 2 years.

For the final notes: I have all the required knowledge to make this
program run good calcuations, but my programming skills are just
enough to make the user interface and write all the algorythms used in
engineering/calculating constructions. Being it possible to use
pdftex, which i find most suitable for my purposes, can i count on
some help linking it with my program ?

Thank you for all the help.

-- 
Best regards,
Piotr Turkowski


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