Subject: Re: FAQ -- equation editor
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 22:01:21 CST
On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Paul Rohr wrote:
>
> Have you decided what style of markup you'll want to use for the equations:
>
> - MathML (a la Mozilla or Amaya),
> - TeX/LaTeX (a la LyX), or
> - something else entirely?
>
I have been thinking about this a lot and have even started investigating
MathML (a very little). Having used Lyx, it has a marvelous equation
editor. However I really like the idea of going with standards like
MathML. I have briefly used Amaya equation editor - which is really
limited - though maybe it could be extended.
My ideal would be use the Lyx equation editor to produce MathML output.
But we would have to make sure we could do that with requiring Latex or
Tex. (At least an extra 20 megabytes for windows users.)
> If you're planning to go with MathML, then we'd probably want to upgrade to
> expat 1.1 so that we could take advantage of its new namespace support.
> That way, the contents of the <math> </math> container would all get managed
> by the equation editor -- either as part of the piece table, or perhaps in
> its own undo-savvy data structures.
>
> On the other hand, it's less obvious to me how you'd intermingle XML and TeX
> syntaxes in an unambiguous way, but I assume there are ways to make the
> parsing problem tractable.
>
> Does that sound at all reasonable? I hope so, but I have to admit that
> we're really stretching the state of my ability to help frame the problem
> here.
>
That is a nice summary. I didn't know expat did that. Hmm that makes
MathML even more compelling. I love those Lyx latex commands though!
> Paul
>
> PS: I can't *tell* you how glad I am to not have to be implementing any of
> this code. Getting equations to format nicely from an interactive GUI
> presents all sorts of usability challenges, so I'm thrilled to have a group
> of finicky expert users taking charge of this stuff.
>
"User" is the correct description of me. I hope we can actually DO what I
want it to!
Cheers
Martin
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