[Wikipedia-l] Re: Parsing TeX
Neil Harris
usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk
Wed Jul 31 21:10:50 UTC 2002
The Cunctator wrote:
>On 7/31/02 3:20 PM, "Jens Frank" <JeLuF at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>
>>Building an interpreter as mighty as TeX to process formulas is a big
>>task, and using PHP would take very long to parse one formula.
>>
>>I've hacked the phpwiki code to add a new namespace
>>[[math: ]] so you can write formulas like [[math:a^2+b^2=c^2]] or
>>[[math:\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{n}=\infty]].
>>
>>The code will make TeX create an image (PNG) of the formula. Those
>>images will be cached, they will be created only once and will be
>>shared between articles. ( [[math:E=m c^2]] might be used on many
>>pages ).
>>
That's a _really brilliant_ hack -- the idea of using the TeX code as
the name of a page is the obvious right thing!
We should have a garbage-collector sweep up orphan math: pages every so
often.
We should also be really cautious about TeX doing insecure things. Is
there a subset of TeX syntax we could parse and validate before we pass
it to TeX?
>>
>>Processing one formula took about one minute on a very old 486/DX2,
>>why I didn't submit the code to LDC for review or comments, yet.
>>
>>
The new server should run that code in about 0.5 second on one of its
two processors, given typical CPU scaling figures.
See http://field.hypermart.net/CPU/cpu.htm
>>
>>
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