Re: Permission to commit Latex equation editor?

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 01:32 +1100, msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> That is the entire output of itex2MML. I created a file with the Latex
> expression and piped it into itex2MML with..
>
> cat fred.tex | itex2MML

I see. Then these fragments are not well-formed by themselves.

> > there is no need to lookup a latex book, fortunately (there are nearly
> > 2000 MathML entities!) The MathML spec lists them all, and gtkmathview
> > provides an XML file with the correspondence between entity names and
> > Unicode characters (see the file entities-table.xml in gtkmathview)
>
> Excellent! What do we need to do to make all this work?
>
> Is there a simple solution to get GtkMathView to recognize the Entities?

The only sensible way is to declare them. However, I don't like the idea
of declaring 2000 entities for each fragment of Math.

My opinion is that itex2MML should be fixed. In general, I try to avoid
XML entities altogether, they're more often a source of trouble than
really useful. I understand that the author made his life much easier
(and the tool simpler) by converting any \alpha into α without
fooling around with thousands of Unicode numbers, but tweaking
gtkmathview to work around itex2MML's deficiencies doesn't sound good to
me. And, by the way, itex2MML's source code shows severe memory leaks
and produces dozens of invalid memory accesses when run through
valgrind.

The very nice thing about itex2MML is that it's really small, in
practice there is only one source file that one needs (the .y) so,
provided all the above issues get fixed and the author gives permission,
it seems like a trivial piece of code to copy&paste into the plugin.

> > sure. The TeX fonts themselves are available as TTF. It is writing the
> > backend for using them, and making it work for printing too, that is not
> > trivial. Unless we manage to open them and request specific glyphs from
> > them via the sole AbiWord interface to system fonts.
> >
>
> We should be able to do that. I recall we used Symbol to get us started
> because it was already widely available.

Hope to look into that soon.

--luca
Received on Mon Mar 7 16:07:25 2005