[Branch: openmath] Use MicroTeX as a static library ? #130
Comments
|
You could modify the Then you just need to rework the parts of the library that interact with microtex to never use static variables |
|
The static variable problem in dll is also a problem whenever I want to use a singleton. I do have a job scheduler that should only be initialized once in the whole program, and calling it from the dll would mean having two job schedulers. I ended up making an interface that collects all the calls and redistributes them to a separate interface that is not in the dll. This way, my static variables are not reinitialized. |
|
Do you really need to build as a DLL, @jokteur ? When you said "static", I really thought you wanted to build it as a static library, not a DLL. Many years ago, I decided to never build DLLs again (nor shared libs on UNIX either). I took the everything-static approach forever, and my life has been much easier since then 😄 These days, prebuilt apps are in the order of hundreds of MB, and games in the order of GBs (even if they include dozens and dozens of DLLs/DSOs in their installation). My apps are much smaller than that (usually they take about 10MB or so), even if I build everything static. |
|
By the way, can you share your imgui backend? I'd like to be able to build MicroTeX without Cairo and without any dependencies (apart from the dependencies required to use imgui, obviously). |
|
The static build is available now, you may pull the newest code from branch openmath, and put the following code in the file I'll make a CMake option to make it work. |
|
@NanoMichael thank you for your static build. I will test it probably next week. @cesss it is currently a big WIP where a lot is not working on the moment. I will share it once I have something satisfactory. |
|
OK, I've updated the CMake build, now with the newest code on branch openmath, you can just give the |
It can be done via the |
|
This is great, @NanoMichael , just what I wanted!! One question, though: I see there's a serialized command for loading a font file... when my code reads this code from a byte sequence, what font format should it support, and on what directory should it look for the font file name it receives? This is the point I find hardest to understand in this moment. Would stb_truetype be adequate for parsing the font file that such command can specify? |
|
Do you mean the command code 3 (set font by family name)? MicroTeX doesn't need font files, the "font" concept is transparent to MicroTeX, actually a "font file" is just a key to your graphics backed to find your platform-specific font. That's somewhat a little bit hard to understand 😂, let me explain. In short, MicroTeX uses the "clm" (stands for cLaTeXMath, it is the original name of MicroTeX) data file which contains the font info, glyph metrics, math tables, and other significant information to layout math formulas, the "clm" data was generated by Take
// read "clm" data file to get its contents as a byte buffer
// assume the 'read_binary_data' reads the binary contents from a file
unsigned long len;
const unsigned char* data = read_binary_data("your_clm_data_file_path", &len);
// initialize the context
microtex_init(len, data);
// ... use the context
// load 'XITSMath-Regular.otf' to your graphics backend
auto your_platform_specific_font = load_font("res/xits/XITSMath-Regular.otf");
// or your graphics backend can find the font by its name (probably with style and weight,
// for XITSMath-Regular.otf, the style is `Regular` and the weight is `Normal`)
auto your_platform_specific_font = load_font_from_family_name("XITS Math");
// in a word, you must have the font "XITS Math" loaded before using it,
// and is able to get the font by its family name
// read "clm" data file to get its contents as a byte buffer
// assume the 'read_binary_data' reads the binary contents from a file
// the family name was read from the clm data
unsigned long len;
const unsigned char* data = read_binary_data("your_clm_data_file_path", &len);
// initialize the context
microtex_init(len, data);
// ... use the context
// impl the deserializer
void set_font(const char* family) {
// set the font to your graphics backend
} |
|
This is really great, @NanoMichael !! Please keep a copy of what you wrote in this reply because I think it can be very useful to be added to the documentation! I'll be using BTW, what clm2 font do you suggest me to use? Which is the one you chose for rendering the samples? (I don't have a preference in font style, I just want to choose the one you consider safer or more tested). |
|
@cesss I did plan to include a modified version of this in the documentation I'm working on at #129 . Fonts are typically a preference thing, however I'd go with Latin Modern (a port of the Computer Modern METAFONT to OTF), as it's the one the proper (La)TeX compiler uses by default (and I really like it :)). But others a probably fine too, as long as you don't pick Fira Math (that one actually looks hideous IMO). |
|
Understood, @sp1ritCS . Looking at their licenses (OFL and GFL), I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've read they don't seem to have copyleft effects in applications that embed them, so what I'm going to do is to convert all the clm2 files to source code arrays, so that my static build of MicroTeX is completely static even for the fonts, and I can try and compare fonts easily at runtime. |
@jokteur It is OK for a WIP PR request 😄, we may help you to find out some quick fixes in case you have misunderstood the API design, but if you don't want to share your code for some reason that's just fine, feel free to make PR or issues. |
Because of limitations of ImGui (see #132, cannot use glyphId, only utf8), there is currently no way to have a satisfactory solution. I would need to hack my way around the freetype library and ImGui internals. Otherwise, I can directly draw in ImGui with paths, but performance is not good enough (ImGui likes rasterized triangles, not paths). For now, I use I guess, a satisfactory solution would be to have a renderer agnostic implementation (no Qt, no skia, no opencv, ...), where it takes the draw calls as an input and outputs a RGBA 8 bit per channel image which can then be used by any renderer. But it needs some serious coding, as fillPath algorithms and antialiasing are not trivial. Maybe I will come back and try to code this implementation, but not immediately. |
why not use Cairo's ImageSurface with ARGB32 format for that? |
|
My current idea is to bake the tessellation of each glyph (I'm working with vector graphics, using tri-meshes, so I need to tessellate the glyphs paths). What I don't know is if MicroTeX can behave that way. I mean, let's image we are going to display "5 + 5 + 3". What I'd need is that the sequence of rendering commands is as follows: In this way, my code would generate the triangle meshes for the repeated glyphs just once for each one, and it will later just reuse such meshes. Is this already the behaviour of MicroTeX, or it doesn't behave like this? |
It could be any format. I happened to use opencv because this is what was installed on my computer at the moment.
@cesss If you want to understand how microtex draws latex, I suggest you look at the different implementations |
@jokteur I'm not familiar with imGui, does it use FreeType to rasterize glyphs? Perhaps you can use FreeType to generate bitmaps from glyphs and pass them to imGui to draw. See Managing Glyphs from the FreeType2 tutorial. |
It uses stb_truetype, but there is a freetype extension. It is just that behind the scenes, everything is in utf8, so I can't use |
Well I just suggested ARGB32, because I assume it's almost the same as that |
Hello again,
I will probably post a few issues as I am discovering how to use this library. I managed to solve #127 by following the examples. It compiles with MSVC and Imgui. I did a quick implementation of
graphic_imgui.handgraphic_imgui.cpp.For now, I have the following problem: as I implement
graphic_imgui, which will be exported to a shared library (dll with MSVC), it is impossible to use static variables in the original GUI library. I will make an example to be clearer.Lets say that loading a font needs a static variable (to check if the application is initialized):
Now when implementing
graphic_imgui, if I do the following:there will be a problem. Indeed, as
Font_imgui::Font_imguisymbol will be in the shared library (lets call itmicrotex-imgui), as soon as this dll will be loaded, the static variableApp::app_statewill be reinitialized, even if it was correctly initialized in the main thread of the application before the dll was loaded (this is exactly what happens when I test MicroTeX with my dllmicrotex-imgui).I do know that
staticvariables are evil, andexternvariables even more so. But it may happen that the GUI library uses some internal static variables that may be used when loading fonts or other things. I feel like (when following the examples) that MicroTeX forces me to create a shared library where I need to create an interface within this library that interacts with the rest of the project. It also possible that I missunderstood how to use correctly this project.I see here three workarounds:
graphic_xxxdoes not need to be loaded at runtime. My question would be: how to do this ? I tried to change theCMakeLists.txtinlib/but failed miserably.graphic_xxxin an abstract way, such that it don't directly makes calls to the GUI library.I thank you in advance for your answers.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: