Layout plain old text?

[ChrisB]

Hi,

I'm wondering if there are any plans to have mathtex render plain old
paragraphs of text.

typesetting is a notorious pain in the &#$&#, and TeX does it
beautifully. However, as we all know, it's not a system that is easy
to embed.

My use case at this point is wanting to get a rendered image of simple
things, maybe even single paragraphs. It seems that once you can use
TeX algorithms to lay out math, text should be easy -- but what to I
know?

-Chris

[Freddie Witherden]

Hi,

Mathtex implements the boxmodel of TeX in order to render mathematical
expressions in a similar fashion. Sadly it does not implement any of
the advanced line-breaking, hyphenation, justification or page
breaking algorithms present in TeX.

The Scribus project, however, have implemented many of the algorithms
into their DTP package. (Optical margins, hyphenation, line breaking,
justification and even microtypography). Their code (C++ using Qt) is
also quite easy to grok.

Regards, Freddie.