Subject: Re: Equation Editor. (fwd)
From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Tue Sep 05 2000 - 09:16:56 CDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Caolan McNamara" <cmc@stardivision.de>
To: <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 9:13 AM
Subject: RE: Equation Editor. (fwd)
| At 07:09 03.09.00 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
|
| >I though the everyone might interested in this exchange.
| >
| >Cheers
|
| The mathtype people have their file format on their site for ages, its a
| trivial format and StarOffice|OpenOffice implements importing and exporting
| to that format, I would think that the easiest for something like abi would
| be to just use MathML as the equation format (which we will be doing)
Be careful. MathML is meant for describing what something *is*, not how it's
displayed. Here's an (TeX) example:
f(a+b)
Does this mean f as an function of (a+b) or f multiplied with (a+b). It's
impossible to tell. But if this is written in MathML, it's unambiguous. This
means that it can be processed algebraically in another program (e.g.
Mathematica) or rendered in several ways (e.g. as speech). The equation editors
I know about are based on visual presentation ((La)TeX too).
MathML comes in two "flavours", presentation and content. But even if you use
presentation-based mark-up, it'll still be possible to understand if you mean f
as a function of (a+b) or the prodcut of the variables f and (a+b). This is
accomplished using entity references like &invisibletimes;.
One solution I would like for an AbiWord equation editor is a way to create
*good* content MathML using a "verbal" language. One program which uses this is
Dave Raggett's (the editor of the HTML specification) EZMath. Here you write
mathematics like you would speak it, and it outputs (good) content MathML. This
is *very* easy to use and to learn, and actually faster than using a purely
visual equation editor. Here's some examples.
The quadratic formula:
x = {-b plus or minus sqrt {b^2 - 4ac}}/2a
Differentiation:
derivative of y wrt x = 2ax
Trigonometrical functions:
sin {2x} = 2 sin x times cos x
Limits:
{limit as x tends to infinity of integral from 0 to x wrt y of e^y^2} = sqrt pi
/ 2
--#
Karl Ove Hufthammer
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