What is the best method of printing math equations in a C# (winforms) desktop application? The format for the source is not important; I can generate almost anything with a little effort. What is important is that it should be relatively high performance and low overhead (I know, I'm only supposed to pick 2 of { performance, size, features } but I want all 3.)
Things I have considered:
LaTeX via System.Process() -> dvipng. Problem: even a minimal LaTeX instal is about 200 MB. Considering that my app is currently ~400k I think this is a bit excessive.
Some sort of JS-based math rendering library designed for the web, e.g. JSMath. Problem: creates HTML output, which still needs to be displayed in a WebBrowser. Low (probably very low) performance.
Rolling my own. Problems: Takes a lot of time and effort to duplicate the works of those who have gone before. Difficult to draw text in C#.
Any suggestions? Have any of you done this sort of thing in the past?
Some googling lead me to this CodeProject article: it uses MimeTex, a library that generates gif from latex formulas. You'll have to use PInvoke to have it in C#, but everything seems to be in the article.
You can use MEEL for WinForms. It realy easy to use.
A potential solution for your application, if it is feasible, would be to host an online active server page that you could pass LaTeX markup and have it return an image. Obvious constraints include bandwidth, network access, and speed.
Using the CodeProject and MineTex links provided by CharlesB would be great starting points, from which a C#/ASP solution could be implemented.
Then, from winforms, you could make the request and obtain an image which could be displayed within a control, or even rendered using GDI+.
Related
Is there a way to embed HTML into a windows forms custom usercontrol? I want to create a lightweight control to be used in a .NET 4.0 application, but since the contents of it is viable to change, I was thinking using HTML to lay it out might be easiest. Is there a way to achieve this in windows forms? There are some other topics with C# and HTML but pretty sure non involves creating a control that parses HTML and displays it.
Thanks
You could use a WebBrowser, but I'd recommend not going down that path. Just use traditional controls to accomplish what you need, if at all possible, maybe combined with a little GDI+.
A WebBrowser would be your best bet in terms of ease of use and maintenance. You can have further control over the contents themselves by accessing the browser.Document.DomDocument interfaces and events. I would not recommend using GDI since it can become a pain to maintain and manage custom rendering in the long run.
I have been trying to do a similar thing and have found awesomium. They have a dotnet and mono wrapper and quite fine grain control over the whole thing acts. It is also free as long as your company makes less than 100k a year.
Forgot to mention it is a browser that you basically embed in your application so you don't need to worry about the user not having it installed or anything and is consistant over pc's and OS's
I want to make a similar application to Skype, and the main problem is working with video and audio. The first problem is how to get a bytes array of the video (to be specific, I need to get bytes which represent the video, so that I can send them over the internet), and same with audio. The second problem is to play bytes that come from the other computer.
I've been thinking to do that in WPF. I'm new in WPF (I have practiced a little bit, and made couple of programs among which is a basic chat program). I'm doing this for practice, and I want to code by myself as much as I can, server, client, transmision of data, and so on...
I've been searching over the internet, and only one solution seems to me to be good, or better to say feasible, is to use DirectShow.
Just to add, I know that camera and microphone is supported in Silverlight, and I've tried that (actually, I've tried to host an HTML page with silverlight project in WPF project in which were webbrowser control, and I've succeeded to show video from my webcam), but I don't know how to get bytes which represent video.
Is that possible to do with WPF or silverlight?
I'll be very grateful for suggesting any solution, advice, or useful links.
Using DirectShow filter graphs, you'll have a direct access to image and audio buffers from input devices (such as cameras and microphones) as bytes array, sample by sample. You'll be able to directly manipulate the data, to chose a coding or compression format (using specific filters), and to control the data rate and synchronization.
However :
if you've entirely new to this environment, it will be hard. Also, I know it works nicely with C++, but I've never coded any Directshow application in C#. (You may want to look this way : CodeProject Tutorials, MSDN DirectShow topics, and tests using graphedit)
streaming media accross a network and receiving it with Directshow is not trivial and can be quite a pain. Network renderers and network source filters are available all around, but are always difficult to use in my opinion. And depending on your video format (H264, MPEG, MJPEG...) and network protocol (RTSP, plain old simple UDP...) choices, you might end up having to write your own stream/source filters, which is hard and time consuming.
Nevertheless, it IS feasible, and if your main objective is practice with coding, then why not !
(Never used WPF, maybe it's actually way simpler !)
I can't speak to WPF or Silverlight, but I've done this in DirectShow, and it's a pain in the ass.
If you want to use .NET, there's an open source wrapper called DirectShow.NET, that helps alot, and it's still a pain in the ass.
Microsoft did a good job with DirectShow and the whole Filter-Graph thing, but then they sort of dropped the ball a while ago and haven't updated it in years.
I'd recommend looking for a different technology(although it probably sits on DirectShow), and I'd be interested to hear what you find.
To all who are interested in this subject,
After spending hours and hours searching the internet, i managed to find a solution that should work. With Silverlight i take captures, resizing them to 160x120 (or less), and than convert them with imagetools. One thread that is responsible for taking pictures, starts capture, and when it is finished (capturing is asynchronous, so you need semaphores to use) it sleeps for 200ms; thats almost equivalent to 5 frames per second. I'm doing all of this because i have slow upload bandwidth, about 16 kilobytes per second, so i have to compress one frame as much as i can. Result is low detailed picture, but if u use 100x100 rectangle for viewing it, it isn't too bad. I haven't tried it with the internet yet, but, as i have said, it should work. I've also tried using compress methods, to compress picture a little more, if it is possible, but i don't know how to use that class (something is not working well), so left that for another time. Now i just want to make it work, and latter i'll try to make better performance.
Oh, one more thing, I also have to solve problem with audio transmission, and that needs a lot of work.
So, hear latter.
I've been using Google's Annotated Time Line Visualization component for the last couple of weeks and I love it! I've been able to make plots with about 10k points without much trouble.
Do you know of a desktop component I could plug into my application that delivers the same WOW factor that Google's component does? I don't care what the language/toolkit is. I prefer C#,Java,Ruby,C++ or Python... (in that order) however any other's would apply. I also prefer it to be free and open source, but if it's not that's OK as well.
Thanks for your time!
Note: This doesn't have to be cross-platform. Windows is fine.
Edit (2009-08-07):
Even if I can only plot 10k points, I am fine with that. I would just like a desktop control that delivers the same "wow" factor and works in a similar manner (zooming, scrolling, annotations, etc) that the Google component does.
Edit (2009-09-03):
I really prefer the language to be C#. I started a bounty to see if anyone can find some good ones. I want it to be almost identical to Google's Annotated Timeline Component. I would use Google's Component, but I want a desktop component... and I don't want to run into performance limitations because of the browser. Using Adobe Air is out of the question.
Edit (2009-09-03):
Do not recommend Visifire. I have evaluated it, and it doesn't support zooming. Remember, it must be very close to Google's component in terms of functionality and "wow" factor.
This WPF-based chart control at codeproject may put you in the right direction. It's got smooth panning/zooming/scrolling :
WPF Chart Control With Pan, Zoom and More By John Stewien
If you're needing to plot millions of points, you're going to run into performance issues quickly if the control doesn't have a mechanism for loading/sampling only what it needs to display. Even then, that's a very large number of data point to want to access in one control.
Hm i am not sure if this is what you are looking for, but for java there is the very good library JFreeChart which is not exactly as interactive as the one you mentioned but it is really easy to use and pretty flexible for you to subclass and tweak to your preference.
Perhaps you could take a look at matplotlib. It's a python based library, however it's very flexible in that it can take it's input from a variety of sources.
An alternative is to embed a web browser control in you wpf application. You'll probably need access to the DOM, so you might have to use the WebBrowser in a WinForm. A good article descibing how this is done can be found here.
Microsoft also has free chart control you can get at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=130F7986-BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en. It's pretty good--especially for being free.
I have used Dundas charts in the past. They are excellent but pricey. There are several other vendors with good chart controls including DotNetCharting, Telerik, Component Art, and Infragistics.
I am working on the development of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in .NET using C# and Silverlight. One of the features that has been requested for this game is to allow players to upload their own avatars.
Rather than displaying the uploaded images in their raw forms, we want to convert the images to a cartoon form--in other words to cartoonize the image.
Several sites which can accomplish such a task are listed at http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/11-sites-to-create-cartoon-characters-of-yourself/
I realize that these sites are applying an image filter to create the cartoon image. Frankly, I have no reasonable idea what these cartoon image filter algorithms might look like or if there is anything already available in C# or .NET that I could use. If there are no libraries available, I am curious how difficult it would be to roll my own.
This is a minor game feature so I am not interested in devoting a week or more of coding time to implement this. However, if I can code up what I need within a day, then it is probably viable.
At this point, I am primarily looking for guidance as to
what is possible
what libraries are already available (preferably as open source)
where i may find additional information
any other advice or guidance you may be able to provide
Thank you in advance!
Apparently you apply a Gaussian Blur filter to the image. Then you sharpen the image. Perhaps the AForge libraries would help you out.
I've used code from the image processing lab on code project before with success. (update: here's the library it uses)
Christian Graus also has written a whole series on GDI image processing which I found useful (and has the effects listed above for filtering capabilities).
How can I implement ActiveX Document on C#/.NET? (ActiveX Document can draw itself in IE)
Update: I need a solution for drawing my own document type in IE windows (like MS Word or MS Excel draw its documents in IE).
You need to dive into OLE for that purpose.
Things like IOleDocument, IOleInPlaceSite (see MSDN for that). Figure out which interfaces are needed for the client (as IE would be the container and will need to communicate with your interface implementations), and how the communication is going on, e.g. what gets called when.It's not rocket science, but I believe still a fair amount of work.
Look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.htmldocument.domdocument.aspx, it's .NET wrapper for DOM Document
My first thought is that you could use a WPF Page, which can be hosted in a WPF window or in IE.
From MSDN:
Encapsulates a page of content that can be
navigated to and hosted by Windows
Internet Explorer, NavigationWindow,
and Frame.
This is possible but it is tough.. What is bad is the lack of documentation... Microsoft has no interest in supporting this scenario. Another difficult part is debugging the boundaries between the HTML/DOM and the ActiveX control.
For what you're doing, it sounds like Silverlight would be a better choice. It only supports a subset of .Net, but it supports drawing graphics. It'll be a lot easier for you to find documentation. And it will run on non-Windows computers.
But maybe you need something Silverlight doesn't do (like audio input support). If thats the case, there's various blogs on the subject of varying quality. Here are the two that stood out as most helpful to me:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/CreateActiveXDotNet.aspx
http://blog.ianchivers.com/wordpress/?p=22
I do recommend using OleView to inspect the type libraries you produce, and make sure its what you expect. You can also do this to see how to break event properties into get/set functions, which is something I had to do to debug some scenarios.
Also be cognizant of the difference of "attaching debugger to process" with scripted or managed debugging. At some point you'll attach with one when you think you've used the other.