Latextogrob: LaTeX Formulae into HP 50g

Question

Hi, some time ago I bought an HP 50g and wanted a good way to write formulae in order to be readable by the calculator.
Googling, I found a tool called WinHP (as you might guess, only for Windows, but works with wine).
The problem is that WinHP is not well-suited to work with the keyboard and you have to use the mouse to click on symbols.
I kept googling and found no tool to write LaTeX formulae and then convert them into an HP 50g readable format, so I tried to do it myself.
It works the following way:
You write a file with one formula per line, execute this program with the file as a parameter, and you get a grob file with all formulae.
An example file:
Wave Length:
\lambda=\frac{v_p}{f}
Quadratic Equation:
ax^2+bx+c=0
Solution:
x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}
As you can see, it is optimized for typing less, so you needn't write a formula between $. It also replaces "(" with "\left(" and ")" with "\right)"
I hope you find it useful. Feel free to modify the script to suit your needs: add more search and replace rules, delete some...
Advantadges:
No mouse needed to type formulae
It runs on Linux natively
The output format is a native HP 50g format, so no need of external libraries
Disadvantadges:
Files are bigger than WinHP's ones
It only runs on linux...
This is how it looks like:
You can find a PKGBUILD in the AUR
Last edited by swiftscythe (2013-01-23 09:23:42)

Answer 1

dgonzalez003 wrote:
Wow, this tool looks fantastic!! I am very used to LaTeX, so this seems to be a very convenient way of writting formulae and viewing them in my hp 48gII.
I've succesfully written and converted my equations to grob using your tool. However, I haven't been able to view the grob file in my calculator, after copying it I cannot see it with the file manager. Should I install anything to view the grob file?
Thanks very much.
Thanks for your words
I haven't tried it with HP 48, but the grob file is a very simple way of encoding a bitmap, so it should work by default.
Are the gifs generated properly?
What I do is place it on the SD card, select it and press on "View" from the HP menu, I suppose it works more or less the same for HP 48.