Shoutbox

ok, I know this has been mentioned time and time again, but I really want to have a nice LaTeX script.

Ideally, I'd like it to work if I'm the only one to have the plugin, and the other person has any version of messenger; in that case the rendering would have to be done on the side of the sender. That's probably not going to be feasible (please tell me otherwise!), so I'll leave that there.

Second option, it's a script that both need to have, it sends a TeX/LaTeX string which is read by the person receiving the message, and it is then transformed into images. You should be able to choose which packages to use, for example I know that I want to be able to use xypic. This is a bit more annoying than for the first option, as this involves having the other user having all the packages I want. This shouldn't be that much of a problem though - if the other user is at the receiving end of such messages, he should have a complete LaTeX installed anyway! Plus this saves having to transfer image files.

So, I don't have any experience writing scripts, but I'd be willing to learn if I had an idea about how to go about it, if it's actually possible. The first problem seems to be: once the receiving user gets the text, how do the images get displayed? I assume it's doable to get the user to receive the message, read it and transform it into some image format like PNG. But what then? In the best of cases, I'd like the image to appear inline, but how can the image be displayed? It seems oversized emoticons aren't possible; I've seen mentioned converting images to Ink, anyone succeeded with this? It's really at this point I need input - if there's a way to do this (and, even better, if it can be done "safely", so that we are reasonably confident we'll be able to do this in future versions of WLM).

Really, if you see any way of getting this to work, as long as it works reasonably nicely, I'm prepared to spend quite a lot of time into getting it working - I find it such a shame that this doesn't yet exist!

Thanks.