README.md

latex2png

A tiny command-line utility for generating PNG files from LaTeX snippets. The entrypoint is ./latex2png.

$ echo 'Hello! Would you like a slice of $ \pi $?' | l2p

Usage

Let's assume we have the following file:

$ cat res/example.tex-snippet
The best equation is $ e^{i\pi} = -1 $! It uses $ e^{x+iy} = e^x\left(\cos{y} + i\sin{y}\right) $.

This program uses stdin/stdout by default. For example, to write a LaTeX snippet to res/example.png, you could do

$ cat res/example.tex-snippet | ./latex2png > res/example.png

In order to generate this snippet:

It's also useful to pipe this directly to your clipboard. You can do that with

$ cat res/example.tex-snippet | ./latex2png | xclip -selection c -t image/png -i  # Ubuntu
$ cat res/example.tex-snippet | ./latex2png | pbcopy                              # MacOS

To get the most out of this, we could add the following to our .bashrc (on Linux)

l2p() {
    /path/to/latex2png/latex2png "$@" | xclip -selection c -t image/png -i
}

Then we'll be able to get a snippet into our system clipboard with just

$ cat res/example.tex-snippet | l2p

To use filepaths, you can pass -i $input_file and -o $output_file, as in

$ ./latex2png -i res/example.tex-snippet -o res/example.png

For the full API, check

$ ./latex2png --help

Installation

To install on MacOS or Debian-based systems, run

./scripts/install

If you'd like to add support for another operating system, just open an issue or submit a pull request :^).

Troubleshooting

If you have any problems, feel free to file an issue!