Add Math Support/Abstract

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Look at the source, the wiki destroyed the ascii-art formating!

Rationale


I often wanted to have a tool that allows complicated layouts but still is easy to use. This is exactly what scribus does. However for scientific papers it lacks one main capability: Formulas. So I want to add these as my summer of code project. Interest in this improvement is expressed by many people in the bugtracker [1][2], by debian users [3] and it's also in the projects roadmap [4].


Overview


The goal of this project is to add a easy to use math support to scribus. As the task of writing a complete math typesetter is too large for SOC a different approch is used. It is inspried by the Quark XPress(tm) plugin MATHSETTER [5]:

- Let the user enter LaTeX source either directly or more userfriendly via an graphical editor - Apply a LaTeX template on this so the user only has to type the formula and not a whole TeX document. - Run LaTeX on this source. - Display LaTeX's output in a frame while still keeping the (LaTeX-)forumla as a property so the whole things stays editable.

Use cases


o Scientific posters

 It is very hard (if not even impossible) to create good-looking posters
 with LaTeX but it's easy to add formulas to LaTeX documents. On the other
 hand it's very easy to create good posters with scribus but a complicated
 process is necessary to add just a single formula. The ability to use LaTeX 
 for typesetting the forumla and the post-processing it in scribus (easily
 possible, after all it's just a vector graphic from scribus' point of view)
 would greatly simplify this. 

o Math/Physics teachers

 At school I've seen a lot of teachers that created their tests with Microsoft
 Word and relying on its forumla editor or even on basic text formatting
 (sub-/superscript) and adding any "complicated" math symbols (vectors,
 integrals, etc.) by hand in the printout. Obviously the full power of
 latex is something they are unwilling to learn (and it is probably not 
 required for them). So I belive they would be happy to have a WYSIWYG
 tool that supports embedded forumlas.

Deliverables


Math support, GUI editor, Python bindings