I wonder if it would be beneficial to skip the external parsing step and leave all parsing to TeX. The advantage would be that all TeX functionality is immediately available without any additional work, including macro packages such as those for * commutative diagrams and graphs (xypic) * chemical structure formulas (chemtex) * music scores (musictex) * chess diagrams
There is no safety issue, since TeX can be made to run safely so that no shell processes can be called and only the standard files can be generated.
The only disadvantage I see is that we would lose the optional HTML rendering of formulas. While I like that feature, I think we can live without it: most advanced formulas cannot be rendered in HTML anyway, and those that can should probably be written in HTML in the first place to be nice to anonymous users with non-graphical browsers.
Axel
--- Payment: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%F6nig%27s_lemma
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