Mathhack Instructions

Formula syntax is everything LaTeX supports in math mode. This is supported for the LaTeX writer and for anything else by converting with LaTeX (and some external commands) to images.

There are now other solutions (see the FAQ entry) that employ dialects of LaTeX for translation to MathML so you should consider limiting yourself to the intersection of the syntaxes if you want to allow all possible convertions.

Just write:

text... :texmath:`formula` ...text

or simply:

text... `formula` ...text

for inline formulas; for display formulas use a directive:

.. texmath:: formula

Inline formulas can also be written with substitution references:

text... |name| ...text

.. |name| texmath:: formula

Now you take this (in file foo.txt) and run:

mathhack.py foo.txt | rst2latex.py - foo.tex

which converts the roles/directives to raw:: latex directives or:

imgmathhack.py foo.txt | html.py - foo.html

which runs TeX (generating images into a subdirectory!) and converts the roles/directives into img:: directives. Quick, dirty and convenient ;-).

To allow including preprocessed files, do:

mathhack.py included.txt > included.txt.mathhack
imgmathhack.py included.txt > included.txt.imgmathhack

and include included.txt.mathhack (imgmathhack.py will mangle this to include included.txt.imgmathhack automatically). My makefile can do all this for you (just set ENABLE_MATHHACK=1).

Note that the imgmathhack.py script relies on some external commands (see the comments at its top). tex_to_images seems to be separately availiable from the speech_tools CVS

Also note that the scripts use regexps to "parse" the roles/directives, so expect some bugs (e.g. don't try to split a formula into multiple lines inside a table cell...).