Earlier this week, I was preparing a presentation that was to include some simple equations I already had LaTeX for. The slideshow in question had far too many fiddly figures to justify bothering with beamer. Rather than fussing with powerpoint addins, I figured it’d be easiest to just include some images of the equations.

Rasterized images of text look horrendous in powerpoint presentations, so I figured I’d try to include postscript images instead. I found a nice post on the TeX section of stackexchange that detailed how to turn an equation into a PNG, and I adapted it for my own use.

Here’s a hacky bash script I wrote to make use of this technique. Note that if you want to do anything outside of math mode, you’ll have to remove the \[ \] surrounding \lformula. There were a few times I wanted to use \eqnarray and had to do this.