<oXygen/> Blog Adding support for embedding Latex equations in DITA content
LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. And LaTeX can also be used to express mathematical formulas in a textual format. By default web browsers and PDF readers do not have support to show mathematical equations written in LaTeX but there are open source projects which can read LaTeX and convert it to other images types.Adding support for writing LaTeX equations in DITA topics would imply three stages:Find a way to write the equation in the DITA XML content. You can either create a DITA DTD specialization and add a new element called for example <latex> which extends the DITA <foreign> element. Or you can use directly the DITA <foreign> element with a specific @outputclass attribute value:<!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Topic//EN" "topic.dtd"><topic id="testEquation"> <title>Test equation</title> <body> <p><foreign outputclass="embed-latex">L' = {L}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}</foreign></p> </body></topic>If you want Oxygen to properly present the LaTex equation when editing in the Author visual mode you need an Oxygen plugin which converts the equation content to an image. There is a sample plugin here which does that: https://github.com/oxygenxml/wsaccess-javascript-sample-plugins/tree/master/latex-images-support. You can download and copy the plugin folder latex-images-support to the Oxygen plugins folder, then restart Oxygen.Publishing to HTML-based and PDF outputs. This DITA Open Toolkit plugin automatically converts LaTeX images to SVG when publishing: https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-latex.
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