How should I go about adding Latex to my version of Freemind

Question

I'm at uni studying Computer Science, and I really like Freemind. The one thing that I feel would make it more useful for me would be to allow Latex equations (kinda like Anki does it).

I've never really taken part in anything open source or modded a project before, so I'd like a bit of direction.

I have two ways of going about this.

I know that Freemind used to have a Latex Plugin, but it is discontinued. I've scrounged some of the files that I think (through intelligent guesswork) are needed to make it work, but I'm still missing what seems to be the big one - latex_plugin.jar. I was hoping that if I could get them together, I could make the plugin work, and think no more about.

The other way is to develop my own plugin. I know Java, and I know how to make Latex source into a png file from the Terminal. I know that Freemind has some sort of plugin API, but all I can find about it is one big daunting XML Schema (a file type I'm unfamiliar with). I can't find any other information about making a plugin (I don't know whether I can make my plugin on its own, or if I need to get the entire source for Freemind and develop to develop my plugin with - and then how do I separate my plugin from Freemind?).

So with that background, my main questions are:

• Would resurrecting the old plugin be a reasonable solution to my problems?

Or assuming that I need to create my own plugin:

• Would this be a good project to start getting into being part of open source software?
• How difficult would you estimate this to be, how long will it take?
• Where do I start? How should I proceed?