pidgin-latex

Reimplementation of popular pidgin plugin used to display LaTeX formulas directly to IM chat.

Requirements

• Latex (in PATH)
• Dvipng (in PATH)

On windows dvipng is usually part of texlive installation, which is what most windows users use.
On unix, if you don't have dvipng installed, use your distro's package manager (aptitude, pacman) to install it.

Both platforms usually add those programs to PATH environment variable automaticaly.

Usage

Plugin searches for text between $$ and $$. When found, this text is substituted for %TEXT% in this file

\documentclass[preview]{standalone}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\definecolor{bgcolor}{RGB}{%SETTINGS_BG%}
\definecolor{fgcolor}{RGB}{%SETTINGS_FG%}
\begin{document}
  \setlength{\\fboxsep}{0pt}
  \colorbox{bgcolor}{
    \color{fgcolor}
    $%TEXT%$
  }
\end{document}

Which is then processed by latex to create dvi file. Such file is then processed with dvipng to create png image containing desired output. That image is inserted directly into a displayed message.

Plugin is enabled in IM chats, not in group chats (like IRC).

Plugin is configurable directly from pidgin GUI. It has following options

• background color: In format R,G,B. It's substituted for %SETTINGS_BG%. Default value is white.
• foreground color: In format R,G,B. It's substituted for %SETTINGS_FG%. Default value is black.
• font size: Desired font size of formula in the image. Default value is 9px.

Download

Windows users can download plugin from this link.
Unix users have to compile it, package is not available.

Installation

Place library file (.dll or .so) to path-to-pidgin/plugins/ (all users) or .purple/plugins (current user) and turn the plugin on in pidgin.

Compilation

In order to compile the plugin, you have to compile pidgin from sources (at least libpurple). See pidgin wiki for instructions.

Once libpurple is compiled, place LaTeX.c and LaTeX.h to pidgin-2.x.y/libpurple/plugins and execute

make LaTeX.so

On windows platform, execute

make -f Makefile.mingw LaTeX.dll

instead.

ToDo

• Retrieve bgcolor, fgcolor and font size from gtk settings, pidgin preferences or directly from message, whichever has higher priority.
• Figure out how to resolve quite long (1second) Latex and dvipng calls which causes pidgin to stop responding.

Bugs

Please report any bugs you found to zereges<at>ekirei.cz or message me directly at github. Attach debug widnow output or screenshots if necessary.

License

This program is licensed under MIT licence. For full text of the license, see ./LICENSE file in this repository.