Re: [matplotlib-devel] Including mathtex in matplotlib

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Freddie Witherden<fr...@wi...> wrote:

> After thinking about the problem a little bit I have gone for the following
> solution. I added support for mathtex to use the wrappers provided by
> matplotlib for FT2Font and _png. It is likely we will want to keep them in
> sync anyway -- so that should not be an issue.

Isn't this a bit backwards?  The point of the GSOC project is to make
the mathtext project available as a smaller, lighter, more widely
accessible project.  If it depends on mpl, what have we achieved
except complexity?   Don't we want the ft2font and png to be provided
by mathtext, and let mpl depend on it to get the stuff there?
Admittedly, mathtex may not be the right name (mpltext?) but
conceptually it seems like we want the low level stuff in mathtex.  Or
am I missing your point here?

> However, I am having trouble working around the fact that mathtex is two
> levels deep (lib/mathtex/mathtex). I can either get the setup.py file to
> install either just the setup* stuff from mathtex or install mathtex as
> mathtex/mathtex. Not sure how to work around this.

You can punt on the setup/dependency issue for now.  In the branch,
you can assume mathtex exists and is installed.  We can worry about
how to handle the setup and distribution issues once we have the
package organization rationalized.  A simple set of install
instructions for developers with very explicit commands to check out
the branch, install the deps, and test would help us test as you
progress.

JDH