Re: Math markup

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2008-08-17 at 10:15 +0200, Adrian Custer wrote:
> Hey Shaun, all,
> 
> Louis just raised this question on gnumeric-list, thought you all might
> have an answer:
> 
> On Fri, 2008-08-15 at 08:17 -0700, Louis Luangkesorn wrote:
> ...snip...
> > (i) There are equations in here, so I need to hear from Adrian if
> > dblatex is reasonable, or if the equations need to be converted to
> > MathML (or if I need to attach images for the equations, not having
> > ever used MathML before.)
> ...snip...
> 
> what's the status of equation handling in gnome docs?

I've had a long-standing intention of making Yelp capable
of doing MathML.  But since nobody's asked for it before
now, it hasn't been a priority.  Since Gecko handles it
natively, it ought to be as simple as passing any MathML
straight through the XSLT untouched.  (We could possibly
add a Content->Presentation MathML layer into the XSLT,
but I think the demand for that is close to nil.)

Of course, writing MathML by hand is a chore.  Just an
absolute nightmare.  Nobody wants to do it.  If I were
designing an XML-based format for math, I'd expect much
more parsing intelligence by applications to reduce the
burden on authors.

I've talked before about using some sort of converter
from a TeX-like format to MathML.  Given such a tool,
we could write DocBook with embedded TeX, then run it
through a pre-processor to turn it into DocBook+MathML
at build time.

Of course, then there's the issue of WebKit.  It seems
we're moving away from Gecko in favor of WebKit.  There
are a lot of things that excite me about this move, but
it does close the window on our MathML possibilities.
Unless, of course, somebody wants to step up.

>From what I've seen of GtkMathView, it seems it can be
plugged into lots of places using different backends,
so maybe somebody could get some WebKit love going on.
What's Luca doing these days?  Could we bribe him?

(And then, of course, there's the issue of having good,
free (as in freedom) math fonts.  I'm not sure, but I
don't think that's really happened yet.)

--
Shaun