This Week in GSoC Mathtex

Officially, according to my schedule this week should've been spent on producing a set of unit tests. Now, usually when things don't go to schedule it is because something bad or unexpected occurred.

However, while looking through the Mathtex code last week something good — but unexpected — occurred. It seems as if splitting Mathtex from Matplotlib is significantly easier than I first anticipated. Therefore, this week has been spent splitting the behemoth mathtex.py file in Matplotlib into several smaller files, ready for externalisation.

I expect that by Sunday or Monday the SVN repository will have a version of mathtex that is able to render equations using a Cairo backend and the FT2Font library from Matplotlib. Once this is working it shouldn't be to difficult to a) add a bitmap backend using FreeType/Cython/libpng; b) use font metrics files as opposed to FT2Font for metrics information.

On a personal note yesterday was also my last day in university accommodation. As of 22:30 BST I am now home again as opposed to being in central London. Yay for packing and unpacking!