Observations on importing

Problem/Motivation

We are creating community education site based around using only free and Open Source editing tools.

As part of our learning material, we create LibreOffice Writer documents (.odt) in which we use the TextMath LibreOffice extension alongside the MiKTex LaTeX compiler to manage embedded LaTeX equations.

Giving it a bash

We thought we'd try out this module to see if it 'went anywhere' and we were very pleasantly surprised that it almost worked out-of-the-box!

This is a really commendable effort to deliver a truly practical and affordable approach to educators - great work!

We would be very amenable to working with the maintenance team to help move it on and to that end, should like to start a dialogue here with the maintenance team and of course anyone else in the community who has the time...

Some observations and questions

We have attached one of our .odt originals along with an associated .pdf version for ease of viewing.

The TexMaths extension clearly somehow embeds its editable LaTeX in an object that is seen by LibreOffice as an SVG which is perfect for us and is precisely why chose it - as for equations, SVG is king and PNG just doesn't cut it.

Our Drupal site supports SVG file embedding directly into the CKEditor and we were amazed to see that this module seems to convert the images in the .odt file perfectly into uploaded .svc files - at least most of the time.

On the whole, we are seeing some pretty good honouring of the SVG files - they are appearing very small and it would be good to have some kind of option in import field settings to add some kind of size=<something> to the SVG images but in reality a simple line of CSS setting the size of all of them works OK.

Inline equations are post-fixed with some extra unwanted markup

When we create the LaTeX in the TexMath extension there is an option to set the Equation Type to either Inline or Display...

The upshot appears to be that the Inline ones get some extra unwanted mark-up brought it after the image AND the images themselves appear to being converted to PNG rather that staying as SVGs...

ToC anchor links need an offset

We very much like that fact that even the Table of Content (ToC) works but we note that an additional offset on the placement of the anchors within the text would help those ToC links to work a little better so that the HML scrolls down a little less and thus shows the linked headings.