HTMLatex 1.3 review

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HTMLatex is a mod_python application that uses memcached to reduce the massive overhead of repeatedly rendering the same equation

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 16K
Developer: Jay Edwards
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HTMLatex is a mod_python application that uses memcached to reduce the massive overhead of repeatedly rendering the same equation. It has an option to sanitize the latex source removing any potentially dangerous code. Currently it is only tested on Apache 2 + mod_python with python 2.3 and py-memcached-1.2. It is fairly generous about the HTML and latex it accepts.

I'm unsure if this will work on Windows as I paid zero attention to interoperability.

HTMLatex has two main goals: first, I wanted to avoid preprocessing; I wanted to be able to type the raw latex into an HTML document and be finished. Second, I wanted the HTML/Latex file to remain untouched.

There is one option: DEBUG. If DEBUG is set, the intermediate files are maintained on disk in /tmp/htmlatex -- this is the only method available for helping to troubleshoot latex errors. Oddly enough, performance should theoretically *increase* if debug mode is on as it doesn't require repeated filesystem access to delete files.

There used to be another option: SANITIZE, which checked the latex source for dangerous code and replaces it with a 'sanitized' graphic. I decidd that giving people the option to auto-render latex code over the web that could do arbitrary things to their PC was a bad idea.

All latex code is sanitized now. If you want to turn it off, just comment out all of the _sanitize() calls in Equation._translateToTex().

What's New in This Release:
Internet Explorer users can now see the rendered equations.
Memcached is no longer used. Instead, images are served from the filesystem.

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