Did you ever wish you could render Tex code using Ruby? Now you can. Ok, it’s not entirly Ruby, but at least we got some bindings now.
I took the code from MimeTex, modified it a bit and wrote some Ruby bindings for it.
So how can I get this, you might ask?
Just install the GEM that that you can download here, using
1 | gem install mimetexrb-1.0.0.gem |
and you’re ready to go.
Have a look at the following example on how to use it:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | require 'rubygems' require 'mimetexrb' renderer = MimeTex::Render.new(4) # 4 is the font size raw_gif = renderer.render('\sqrt{\frac{1}{2}}*\vec{a}') File.open("output.gif", "a") { |f| f.print(raw_gif) } |
This code will produce 
.
In Rails you can use send_data to send the image directly to the user.
Ahhm, just to metion this, the code that does the magic is kinda hackish. I’m really no C programmer.
Hope you enjoy this little gadget. If you have any questions feel free to contact me.