eq2png 0.01

eq2png is a simple Perl script to make it painless to produce Portable Network Graphic (PNG) images for OpenOffice Impress presentations (or for any other purpose I cant imagine).

Suppose you had a LaTeX snippet in a file named example-equation.tex: To produce the PNG image of this with black foreground and transparent background (the default), youd type:

eq2png example-equation.tex

INSTALLATION:

Youll need ImageMagick, dvips, and Perl.

Just copy the script somewhere into your path, and create a config file if you dont
like the default behavior.

EXAMPLE USAGE:

1) Produce an image of a equation at the command line:
eq2png int{a + b} = c -o intergral.png
If you dont specify an output file, it will default to eq.png
If you add the -b flag, it will make your equation bold (or try to). This is nice for presentations (where sometimes
thin lines dissapear).

2) Produce an image of .tex file snippet. The .tex file should only contain LaTeX code
code you want rendered (not preamble or other such stuff, which gets wrapped around your snippet).
For example, a file equation.tex might include one line, sum_{a}^b = x!.
You can then produce an image of this in the following way:
eq2png equation.tex #defaults to producing a png file with the same name, i.e., equation.png
or,
eq2png equation.tex -o outputfile.png #produce a png file with the name outputfile.png

NOTE: eq2png will only assume a filename is a .tex snippet if it ends in ".tex". So,
eq2png equation.eq
will produce a png image of the string equation.eq (probably not what you want).
To specify that the string is a filename, use the -f flag, e.g.,
eq2png -f equation.eq -o outputfile.png

NOTE: if you want to include LaTeX macros in your equations, just place a file named macros.tex (or symlink)
in your working directory. It will be included in the .tex code generated to produce your png file.

NOTE: if you need to include special LaTeX packages, see the config file stuff below.