Brion Vibber wrote:
There's a lovely little program 'dvipng'
which was designed to do
real-time previews of LaTeX in an editor
(
http://sf.net/projects/preview-latex/) but is available as a
stand-alone utility as well. This can replace the dvips & convert steps
of our math rendering.
Thanks for the praise. The program was written for preview-latex but
has gotten a growing independent audience. It is even mentioned in the
TeX FAQ nowadays.
In theory it should be faster (I haven't
benchmarked it), but the neat thing is that it can produce output with
a transparent background, which has been asked for for a while.
In practice it is _much_ faster. You'll find that the main bottlenecks
are 1) writing the image to disk, e.g., on NFS and 2) output of
diagnostic messages. The -q option you use below is very helpful with
the latter, writing images to a local disk with the former. On my
laptop, small images take on the average 2 ms to generate, if you do a
many-page DVI (=one image for each page).
I've been able to get pretty nice output with this
command line:
dvipng -q -D 120 -bg Transparent -T tight -o outputfile.png
inputfile.dvi
which produces files about the same dimensions as our current stuff.
They are 8-bit indexed PNG images with solid transparency, which is
compatible with Internet Explorer for Windows without any hacks, and
will still look nice on most light-colored backgrounds. However, they
won't look too great on a dark background, and some browsers may not be
able to print them correctly.
I find dark background and math terrible anyway. Not much I can do
about this one, but I will listen to any ideas.
There's also a truecolor option that I
haven't tried (which has potential problems of its own).
Such as much bigger files (and slower writing of them).
Hint: dvipng is currently in debian unstable.
/JÅ