eq2png

If you're looking for a simple software solution to produce Portable Network Graphic (PNG) images for OpenOffice Impress presentations, you might want to check out eq2png. This Perl script makes it easy to create PNG images with black foreground and transparent background. You simply need to provide a LaTeX snippet in a file named example-equation.tex and run the command eq2png example-equation.tex.

To use eq2png, you'll need to have ImageMagick, dvips, and Perl installed on your system. Installation is easy, though. Simply copy the script somewhere into your path and create a config file if you want to customize its behavior.

There are a couple of ways to use eq2png. The first is to produce an image of an equation at the command line. Here's an example:

eq2png 'int{a + b} = c' -o intergral.png

If you don't specify an output file, eq2png will default to eq.png. If you want to make your equation bold, add the -b flag.

The second way to use eq2png is to produce an image of a .tex file snippet. The .tex file should contain only the LaTeX code you want rendered, not the preamble or other such stuff. Here's an example:

eq2png equation.tex

This will produce a png file with the same name as the .tex file, i.e., equation.png. You can also specify a different output file using the -o flag.

Note that eq2png will only assume a filename is a .tex snippet if it ends in ".tex". If you want to specify that the string is a filename, use the -f flag.

If you need to include LaTeX macros in your equations, just place a file named macros.tex (or symlink) in your working directory. It will be included in the .tex code generated to produce your png file. If you need to include special LaTeX packages, see the config file stuff below.

Overall, eq2png is a user-friendly software solution for producing PNG images for OpenOffice Impress presentations, or any other purpose you might need. Give it a try!