Pidgin LaTeX
Pidgin-LaTeX has found a new home and maintainer (Florian Delizy). This page is only here for historical reasons. Please visit its new home http://www.unfreeze.net/?page_id=78
This is a small latex plugin for pidgin (formerly known as gaim). I wrote it because i couldn’t get the original gaim latex plugin to compile. And its code looked unnecessarily complicated to me (so porting to current gaim/pidgin was no fun). Anyways, it seems that there are some patches to the original gaim-latex plugin (posted in the sourceforge.net project forum) but i only saw them after writing and announcing my own, so now we have two latex plugins for gaim/pidgin.. (incidentally they are also identically named). Soon after Florian Delizy joined in and contributed patches for this plugin. The majority of the code in the source is now probably his :)
Usage:
The plugin looks for $$latex math$$ patterns, and replaces them by the rendered latex output by way of latex and imagemagick. The graphics is only displayed locally, so your conversation partner will have to use the plugin, too (With MSN, this constraint might not hold). This plugin is compatible with the similar kopete latex plugin, as it uses the $$ as delimiters, too.
So an example input string would look like this:
Screenshots:
Here’s a screenshot:
Download:
You can download tarballs of released versions (and a windows binary .dll) here (the pidgin-latex.tgz is the original and thus oldest release).
This software is right now in alpha stage. It works, but also has some issues.
Requirements:
- LaTeX
- ImageMagick
- Pidgin (Gaim) development packages
TODO:
- Add support for getting the latex command into the clipboard when selecting the latex graphics in the message view window. For the time being you can always press CTRL-UP/DOWN to reedit a previously sent message (This is being worked on in pidgin itself).
@Mulder and @Chino
Confirmed.. Will look into it..
hum, can you send me some screenshots of your message window please ? I’ll try to fix that.
BTW, long path should work as well, this is how I tested it here :
contact : florian DOT delizy AT gmail DOOOT COM
can you precise the protocol as well please ?
I guess it is MSN … I did fixed it but the shipped dll may not include the fix
Did you activate graphical smileys ??
mmmmh lots of questions :D
The protocol I use is Gtalk, but I still don’t know which one I’ll be using to chat with my colaborators.
I just activated smileys, I put the default ones, and seems to work both ways.
Thanks for all the help.
Just one comment, I deactivated the smileys myself. I am not interested in faces winking at me beside my formulas :D, and I didn’t thought that choosing no smileys theme would partialy deactivate pidgin-latex. Would there be a way to add a choice “only latex smileys” in the smileys tab in preferences??
Just asking,
anyway, GREAT WORK! I think I’ll be using it a lot.
Al.
Well, not yet … I am working to integrate a first patch to pidgin, once done, I’ll see check that. There is a way actually, but that will require some work for me …
to be continued … :)
“I’m confirming that the plugin correctly renders text into an image for things that I type, but doesn’t do any rendering on latex I receive from other people in the same format.” — quoted by a user experiencing this problem as well.
This is extremely powerfull plugin… Great work, keep it up, please!
With windows, you need ghost script
Well, I found a way to fix “enable smileys” requirement:
mkdir -p ~/.purple/smileys/empty
cat >~/.purple/smileys/empty/theme
Sorry, comment got truncated. echo -e ‘Name=Empty \nDescription=No predefined smileys \nAuthor=Nobody’ >~/.purple/smileys/empty/theme; (line breaks mean also spaces). This theme will enable smileys, but define none - so $$a$$ is parsed by plugin, but “bad value:out of range” just matches no smiley for :o .
I’m using pidgin 2.2.2. and the dll version of the plugin. Works fine on my end, I see the image, but others using msn only see $$ (insert code) $$. Haven’t tried with others using pidgin since most of my students use msn. Since they’re just smileys though, shouldn’t it work?
Thanks
Good work
Well, no, actually that was something that I was aiming, but for now the image is not sent, you got to use pidgin (or a comaptible plugin), on both sides.
As soon as the bug is fixed in pidgin, I’ll check back
Hi, I’m using the last dll version of the plugin in indows with pidgin 2.2.2 but it doesn’t work for me. Could you tell me where is the temporary image file created by the convert.exe command located, please? I ask it because the error is reported as follows:
“Can not find PNG file that should be outputed by convert
pidgin-latex-1600734881.png”
Yes, please change to / support dvipng.
I did what ChiNO suggested in 48 and 55.
I am using the current pdgin-latex.dll, most recent imagemagick, MikTeX and checked that all the shortened DOS paths of latex.exe and convert.exe
are correct… However, I still get, as JoanPau in comment 64, the following message
“Can not find PNG file that should be outputed by convert
pidgin-latex-1600734881.png”
when I try to execut $$\alpha$$ or $$a+b=c$$, for example. HAS ANYONE WITH A SIMILAR PROBLEM SOLVED THEIR DIFFICULTY? :)
It’s a great plugin but I don’t seem to get it to work with the advice i see here, thus far. Where should the missing .PNG come from the MIKTEX’s latex.exe command?
Help MUCH appreciated … Anyone with same software and Windows XP (and PIDGIN to an MSN account, if that matters) who has found a solution … please let me know…
Thanks
Hi!
As I explained above I solved the problem (as someone else sugested) by allowing pidgin to display smileys (I had previously switched the option off because I didn’t want ordinary smileys in pidgin).
Once the Smileys were active (and probably after relaunching the app, I don’t remember) everything worked fine.
Lately I followed also the guidelines suggested by someone else to create a new smileys theme that allowed latex but no ordinary smileys. But anyway all the info is up here in the previous posts.
If you see the latex image when sending code but receive only code you must have the same problem that I had, if not, you probably don’t have the same problem. So I think that this may be a good indication about the usefulness of my posts.
If they don’t solve your problem I have no clue how to do it, sorry.
Al.
Hi,
i justy wanted to chime in to let you know that my time is very limited atm, so i cannot really look into fixing these bugs. Maybe in the holidays between christmas and newyear i find some time to work out these kinks..
THanks for the patience,
Florian sChmidt
Hello. I don’t want to steal you userbase :) but i thought i should mention that i’ve written a new plugin which makes use of mimeTeX or mathTeX to render graphics.
mimeTeX doesn’t requier either latex or imagemagick and renders the images almost instantly. Unfortunally it only renders gif-images, which can be antialiased, so it looks ok even on dark and light background.
mathTeX requires latex and can use dvipng, takes probably less then a second to render the images.
I’ve also added many options as well, such as font size, font color and some other usefull things.
It can be seen in:
http://www.micket.com/pidginTeXconfig.png
another screenshot:
http://www.micket.com/pidginTeXmsg.png
Unfortunally i haven’t looked that much into Windows version yet, since i can’t test the dll. There is probably some bug in there (if i even managed to compile it properly at all).
Anyway, here is the source
http://www.micket.com/pidginTeX-1.0.0.tar.gz
And a windows dll which i tried to throw together:
http://www.micket.com/pidginTeX.dll
Please send me any bug reports.
I have no problem with that :) As long as it works and makes people happy, why should i have a problem with it? :)
This is open source, baby..
Flo
Hey, I am back in business, if you need some update/feature on the plugin, ring me :)
I’ll check if it still works on the latest pidgin,
the next feature I will add is : send the image using the custom MSN smiley feature, we will see if I can do it using a simple plugin or if I’ll have to hack in pidgin :)
BTW, I am not sure custom smileys are implemented on other protocols, let me know …
here is a new page about the plugin, you can post on that one too (I’ll update it with some other infos :) ), tapas, should I setup an svn on the plugin, maybe sourceforge ? or on my personnal svn server, I can offer latexpidgin.unfreeze.net or something like that if you want …
Hi Florian,
if you want to take care of the project and move it to a hosting site, i fully agree with that. Time constraints do not allow me to put lots of energy into the plugin atm.. So please go ahead :) You have my blessings. It’s open source, baby!! ;)
ok, as you want, this is done, please check out the new home for pidgin-latex :
http://www.unfreeze.net/?page_id=78
I added a svn, and imported all your releases (and mine as well), I’ll start again the dev as soon as I have some time. Please email me a user and password so I can add you to the svn user list :)
All instructions are on the new page, check it out !
Looks good :)
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