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swiftscythe

Member

Registered: 2009-04-28

Posts: 131

latextogrob: LaTeX Formulae into HP 50g

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)

ksira

Member

Registered: 2009-10-27

Posts: 31

Re: latextogrob: LaTeX Formulae into HP 50g

Looks awesome, unfortunately I don't have an HP 50g to test it with! I am stuck with a HP 48 emulator on my Android.

dgonzalez003

Member

Registered: 2011-05-11

Posts: 2

Re: latextogrob: LaTeX Formulae into HP 50g

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.

swiftscythe

Member

Registered: 2009-04-28

Posts: 131

Re: latextogrob: LaTeX Formulae into HP 50g

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.

dgonzalez003

Member

Registered: 2011-05-11

Posts: 2

Re: latextogrob: LaTeX Formulae into HP 50g

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.

The gifs are generated correctly, so is the .grb, because I can view it perfectly using Win HP. The problem is I haven't been able to view .grb files in my calculator. I've tryied to embbed it in a .TGV file, but this didn't work for me

I finally give up: I have not much time and I'd better study. However, you tool is still awesome for everybody who can view GROB files Congratulations!