NAME

Text::AsciiTeX - Convert (La)TeX formulas to ASCII art

SYNOPSIS

use Text::AsciiTeX;

#equivalent examples

my @text_array = render('\frac{1}{e}');
print "$_\n" for @text_array;

my $text_array = render('\frac{1}{e}');
print $text_array;

print scalar render('\frac{1}{e}');

render('\frac{1}{e}');

DESCRIPTION

This module provides a mechanism to render (La)TeX formulae to ASCII art. It is based solely on AsciiTeX written by Bart Pieters (See "UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGIES").

EXPORTED FUNCTION

This module exports the render function.

render( $latex [, $columns] )

Argument(s)

The function render accepts a string containing a formula in (La)TeX formatting. Optionally, an integer may be given to specify the number of columns for the output or zero for no-breaking. The default number of columns is 80.

Return

Since version 0.03 the return value is context aware.

• In list context, render returns a list whose elements are strings, one for each row of the art. Printing each line, terminated by a newline will probably do what you expect.

• In scalar context, render will return a string of the concatenated lines, each ended with a newline.

• In void context, render will print the scalar context return directly to the selected file handle (usually STDOUT).

EXAMPLES

For use examples see "SYNOPSIS". For a list of allowed syntax and syntax examples read Text::AsciiTeX::Syntax.

UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGIES

This module is basically just a C-level Perl wrapper of AsciiTeX written by Bart Pieters. That project is hosted at http://asciitex.sourceforge.net/. AsciiTeX in turn was a fork of eqascii which was written by Przemek Borys. This module owes a debt of thanks to both authors.

SOURCE REPOSITORY

http://github.com/jberger/Text::AsciiTeX

AUTHOR

Joel Berger, <joel.a.berger@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2012 by Joel Berger

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.