Status of LaTeX or LaTeX-like emails.

[Taylor, P]

Peter Flynn wrote:
>
>> Or in TeX's terms, MIME content types generate display maths
>> ($$...$$) whereas what is often needed is inline maths ($...$).

> MIME content types don't generate anything: they're just containers 
> labelled with a file type. So an application/x-latex attachment is 
> currently unrecognised by any email client that I know of, so it will 
> offer for you to save it to disk. If someone wrote a plugin to accept 
> them, that code could very easily run LaTeX on the content of the 
> attachment, and pop up the resulting PDF in another window, or convert 
> it to an image and display it in the mail window like some other images.
>
> But to do that, any such attachment would HAVE to be a full LaTeX 
> document, even a MWE.

Yes, that would be a good reason to work towards supporting 
application/x-tex rather than application/x-latex, since for TeX there 
would be no requirement for there to be a "full document"; for example, 
\setbox 0 = \hbox {$x^2 = y^2 + z^2$}\shipout \box 0 would suffice, and 
the final \end would be implied.

** Phil.