Re: Permission to commit Latex equation editor?

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 09:48 +1100, msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/LatexMathSS1.png
>
> The biggest problem is that GtkMathView is very fragile and lacks support
> for many valid MathML entities right.

at the moment GtkMathView is fragile in several ways. When you say
"entities", what do you mean?

If you mean XML entities like α → and so on, these are
supported, provided that you declare them in the XML fragments that use
them. If you use an XML entity without declaring it, that is not even a
well-formed XML document and the XML parser fails before GtkMathView can
do anything about it. If you were using the GmetaDOM frontend, there is
a trick to fool the XML parser and have it recognize MathML entities
even if they are not declared, but it doesn't work with the libxml2
frontend currently used by the abimathview plugin (and it is a trick
anyway...)

In place of these entities, you can always use the corresponding
character references instead. So you would write α instead of
α and so on (U+03B1 is the Unicode for Greek alpha). Character
refrences are all supported, there is no need to declare them. However,
you must have the proper font to display the characters you want. The
abimathview plugin only provides characters found in the symbol font,
plus the normal ASCII characters. This means that a lot of math symbols
cannot be displayed. To fix this, I should restore the backend for, say,
TeX fonts. But then, it's not clear how to interface it with the AbiWord
graphic class and my biggest fear is that printing would not work just
"out of the box" as it does now. This is quite some work that has to be
done carefully, since most of the code is independent of AbiWord and I'd
like to reuse it even when gtkmathview is not used as a plugin.

I have never used itex2MML, but perhaps there is an option to force it
output character references instead of entities?

Cheers,
--luca