[Parley-devel] [PATCH] adding LaTeX support to parley

[Daniel Laidig]

Hi Frank,

On Sunday 21 February 2010 17:04:26 Frank C. Eckert wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I have finally found the time to bring the LaTeX support for Parley I have
> been using for 2 years into shape for upstream inclusion - at least I have
> started and I find it quite usable. However, there are rough edges and I
> figured I would like to get some feedback whether I should continue working
> on it and / or what direction I should take.

Sorry for replying quite late. We've been busy working on the rewritten 
practice component to get it ready for 4.5 (developed in branches/work/parley-
practice/ in SVN). Unfortunately that also means that the code your patch is 
based on probably won't exist in the next release.

There are also a few issues I had with the patch:
- It looked like there was some error checking missing (e.g. checking if
  converting succeeded)

- I doubt that the "\input{/home/opahk/study/partIII/abbr}" should have stayed
  in the preamble. ;)

However, the biggest issue is that LaTeX support doesn't really fit with the 
concept of Parley as a language trainer. Your patch implements this in a way 
that is quite visible, exposing it as a top-level training mode to the user. 
Additionally, LaTeX is not something most of our target users know and seeing 
it there might be confusing.

That doesn't mean that we don't want LaTeX support in Parley. It's perfectly 
fine if it's integrated in a way that doesn't make Parley harder to use for 
our target users. And personally, LaTeX is something I might also like to use 
in Parley in the future. ;)

I spent some time thinking about the best way to integrate it in the new 
practice UI and this is what I came up with:

- In the flash card and written practice modes, the text is interpreted as
  LaTeX if it's enclosed in "$$" (like "$$\frac{a}{b}$$", just the way Kopete
  does it). This means that there is no extra mode, you just need to use $$
  when writing the files and it will just work.

- Maybe add a dock widget to the editor that helps with the creation of LaTeX
  entries. This will just be a line edit and a preview. Finding syntax errors
  only while practicing doesn't sound like fun. :)

What do you think?

I also had this on my TODO list, but currently getting the new practice done 
has a higher priority.

Cheers,
Daniel

> The attached patch applies to the directory  kdeedu/parley/src of trunk.
> Please place the config files "preamble" and "convert-options" into
> $KDEHOME/share/apps/parley/latex. The patch assumes that convert and
> pdflatex are available in $PATH.
> 
> Description: The patch adds a LaTeX query mode to Parley which converts
> entries to rendered png's via pdflatex. There is no input possibility and
> checking algorithm involved, as this would be pointless for the use cases I
> have in mind (basically mathematics).
> 
> Any feedback would be highly appreciated.
> 
> Cheers, Frank