Please add graphical formula interpretation

[Former user]

Originally reported on Google Code with ID 563

When there are a lot of brackets it's easy to amke a mistake. Input would be much more
clarified if speedcrunch were interpreting divides, powers to classical formats like
wolfram does it

Reported by yanpaso on 2015-06-01 19:08:42

[Tey']

I'm not sure I understand this issue clearly: is it about expressions editing or results pretty printing?

[Pol Welter]

Sounds like pretty printing to me. Really an awesome and exciting feature, but also a devastatingly distant one...

[Tey']

Okay, thanks for the clarification. The OP talked about "input" and making mistakes so that wasn't that clear to me, but on the other hand, I have no idea what it would mean for expression editing.

[Helder Correia]

Looking at this and this, it sounds like a dependency nightmare.

[Pol Welter]

Agreed. I had looked into this briefly at some point. I came to the conclusion, that if we were to commit to pretty printing, we'd have to come up with our own typesetter. We don't need all the fancy LaTeX stuff. Only parentheses, fractions, exponents and square roots should be enough. I don't think that would be all that much more difficult than writing code that transforms our expression into LaTex, and then renders it via that bloated (and deprecated?) QWT library.

[Simon Zumbrunnen]

You could look at MathQuill for inspiration.

[Pol Welter]

Thanks for the hint, we sure might be able to steal some inspiration from how they solved things. However the technology they build upon is very different. They use CSS to style the elements to their needs. For us, there is very little incentive to include a full blown HTML parser just for pretty typesetting. Instead the very limited subset of HTML/CSS supported by QLabel will not allow us to do what we need. (Can we nest <table> to make fractions? Might actually be worth a try.)