Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
1st ¢ You can skip Inkscape and open the PDF directly with GIMP. When asked, set the resolution to something high: 300 or 600 dpi, strong antialiasing everywhere and grayscale. You can then crop and resize the image in GIMP.
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Hmmmm... I will have to do more testing. I think there was a reason a while back I jumped over to Inkscape to handle this. The reasons will probably come flowing back to me.
But yes, Math PDF -> GIMP is most likely even faster for this specific case. Lots of different ways to get from A to B. Hopefully the tutorials spawn some more discussion too, on how everyone else handles the situation, giving lots of A to B options for anyone who comes across the tutorial!
I can quickly think of two reasons why I went the Inkscape route:
- Initially I used to just use the Width/Height for outputting the formulas instead of DPI. Inkscape allowed me to specify the exact size of the resultant PNG. GIMP lets you specify the X/Y of the entire "page" only.
- Exporting only the "Selection" is helpful with vector graphs/tables that I want at a specified width.
- IF needed, you could do some actual editing in Inkscape (changing font, etc. etc.). Although this would best be handled back at the actual source document stage.
- GIMP is an image editor, not a vector editor.
- This is probably the problem I ran into, I wanted to change some things around in some (not so clean) vector files I had gotten, and it was impossible/a complete pain to do in GIMP.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
2nd ¢ If you know some LaTeX, it may be better to create the initial PDF with pdflatex.
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Of course of course... LaTeX would be ultimate (I have to teach myself that, it would be EXTREMELY useful... although I deal with very formula heavy books rarely). Perhaps a better title for this would have been "Beginner's Guide to Formula to PNG".
This tutorial was just something I thought of within the day, perhaps next time I should plan out everything for a month!
"Step 1A: LibreOffice Math"
"Step 1B: LaTeX"
"Step 1C: Codecogs"
"Step 1D: This is a placeholder for something Jellby/Toxaris will mention after posting"
"Step 2: If you followed Step 1A, do this. Otherwise, skip this step!".
I think LaTeX would be WAY out of the league of someone just doing some basic formulas every so often in books they come across.
Using LibreOffice Math (or
http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php as Toxaris pointed out) simplifies a lot of that initial creation.
Perhaps you want to write a tutorial on the basics of LaTeX -> high resolution images for EPUBs? I know that I would benefit.
