pnglatex

pnglatex, a small program that converts LaTeX snippets to png

Requiremens

Python3

A LaTeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX

pdfcrop, pnmtopng, pdftoppm You should be able to find those programs in your distro package manager or Homebrew

pnmtopng can be typically found in the package netpbm

pdftoppm can be typically found in the package poppler-utils

Install

In your terminal, type:

pip install pnglatex

On some systems you might need to use pip3 instead of pip

Usage

pnglatex comes with a simple command line interface.

To use the cli, you can check the help message using:

pnglatex -h

Here's the help message in full:

usage: pnglatex.py [-h] -c "LaTeX string" [-o filename]

pnglatex, a small program that converts latex snippets to png

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -c "LaTeX string"  The LaTeX string to convert
  -o filename        The output filename.

Some examples:

pnglatex -c "\[\frac{1}{2}\]", pnglatex -c foo -o foo.png

pnglatex also includes a single function that you can include in your code.

Here's its docstring in full:

def pnglatex(tex_string, output=None):
    """
    Produce an png based on a input LaTeX snippet.

    @param tex_string: The LaTeX string.
    @param output: The output filename. It can also be a pathlib.Path object.
                   If not provided, this will be randomly generated.

    @return: A Path object of the output file
    @raises ValueError: If the input is empty of something went wrong with
                        the image creation.
    """

An example usage would be:

from pnglatex import pnglatex

output = pnglatex(r'\[\displaystyle{\sum_{i=0}^{10} 3i}\]', 'output.png')

Licence

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

See LICENSE for details.