AbiWord - ABIMATH can display MathML.

Hi everyone,
            This is email is one I've wanted to write for at least 3
years. We now have basic Math support in the ABIMATH brnach.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Luca Padovani, we hashed out a concept at
GUADEC and have implemented a *proof of concept* in less than a week.

What is this proof of concept?

First we can connect GtkMathView's abstract drawing method's to AbiWord's
abstract drawing methods and draw into the AbiWord canvas. This code path
depends only on libxml2 and not on gtk/gobject etc at all. So with a fair
bit of work from platform maintainers and the enthusiastic support of Luca
we can use this mechanism to display maths on all our platforms.

The platform maintainers will need to help Luca port the relevent parts of
gtkmathview to their platforms. But gtkmathview can be maintained as a
seperate library we link to. This will help everyone, especially Luca,
maintain and extend the code.

The Maths is displayed in a new run class fp_MathRun. This is currently an
unbreakable object like a field or an image.

gtkmathview has very limited editting support right now but it has the
structure that will allow us to enable editting in the future. Luca and I
have a vision for a state-of-the-art math editting system that will follow
the abi tradition of extreme WYSIWYG.

ie the math will be editted right in the document in real time.

The system we hacked together is very much a *proof of concept* that we
could use the gtkmathview code to drive our abstract graphics class. We
have a lot of work to do before we integrate this with mainline abiword.

However, I can't help be very proud of what's been accomplish so far.
More-over it has been really *fun* and a great pleasure to work with Luca
on this.

See screenshot (Linux on PPC even!)

http://www.cs.unibo.it/~lpadovan/secret/Screenshot-2.png

Cheers

Martin
Received on Thu Jul 8 03:39:34 2004