Some update on xsltml -- gsoc08latex

Hi Marc and list,

Part of my gsoc project is to add the ability to convert mathml
equtions to latex ones in the latex exporter. As discussed on the irc,
using xslt stylesheets is a reasonable way to go. These days I have
been investigating xsltml [1], a suite of xsl templates for
transforming mathml to latex. I tried the cvs HEAD version. Here is
some brief update:

xsltml supports MathML Version 2.0 quite well. I have not read the
code very deeply, but each xsl:template element in the stylesheet
corresponds to a section number in the MathML 2.0 specification, so I
went through the specification to check what are implemented and what
are not. My finding is that the following things are not supported
(yet), but I believe each of them is either minor or easy to fix :
    * 3.3.6 Adjust Space Around Content (mpadded)
    * 3.5.3 Labeled Row in Table or Matrix (mlabeledtr)
    * 3.5.5 Alignment Markers
    * 3.6.1 Bind Action to Sub-Expression (maction)
    * 4.4.11.3 XML-based annotation (annotation-xml)

It can work with libxslt and libxml2, except for it requires the
source mathml files containing the namespace declaration of
http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML. Not every mathml file has the
namespace declaration, e.g., those in the MathML 2.0 testsuite. But
since gtkmathview has the same requirement, this should not be a
problem either.

The total size of these stylesheets is less than 300kB. It is not
licensed, so there is no license issues.

It seems promising to me, but I still want to hear your thoughts since
I am not experienced in this area. So any feedback is welcome :)

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/xsltml/

-- 
Thanks & regards
Xun Sun