Better image editing through a secondary image editor.

Question

e.mccormick · Answer

Right now, images are mouse mode only. For those of us with a tablet, that is fine. Without that, well, a simple drawing is a chore. Also, these are not always useful for showing some concepts. What I propose is a form of $\LaTeX$ support that would be separate from the MathJaz engine. A new button on the bar would be TikZ/PGF. when selected, this bar would run a $\LaTeX$ based graphics editor. Images could be stored as pictures or pdf files based on what is more effective, smaller, etc. and have a metadata attachment that is the original $\LaTeX$. The editor would not need to do live updates of the image. Just have a "Preview" button that renders the code at that moment. Keep things volatile until the user submits the image. Then the code get locked into a link item in the message, similar to the image link items form the existing image editor. When the post is finally made, that link item is finally rendered into the actual message data. $\Large \textbf{Uses}$ Well, if you look at TikZ and PGF examples, you can see they are applied in a wide range of fields: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/ This is obviously not a replacement for the mouse drawing tool. It is more a way to add finer controls for those that need them. It would allow for quality graphs to be used when going over difficult topics, arrows in graphical examples, 3d imagery, and more.

mathslover · Answer

Nice!

e.mccormick · Answer

Forgot to add that why the orginal code is attached as metadata is so that edit-replies can be done.

theeric · Answer

Very cool. Looks like users would have to be up to the task of coding! Of course, that is true for the equation feature as well. This would be a great tutoring tool for people who can use it.

My mind instantly goes to vector fields, which are important in math and physics. For them, accuracy is important. Drawing arrows is tedious and error has to be handled with imagination or explanations. Coding with "for" loops would be quick once understood, and the accuracy would be excellent.

theeric · Answer

Again, it would be cool to include vector field options.. And an editor could create graphs easily for people, if the editor is coded to make it easy.

How difficult would it be for OpenStudy to create or find such an editor?

e.mccormick · Answer

https://github.com/alabid/flylatex http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/ Or just write a front end to an existing $\TeX$ implementation that would run on the server.

theeric · Answer

Sounds nice!

swag · Answer

Very Nice