RE: FW: DOCBOOK: Equations.

[Peter Ring <pri at magnus dot dk>]

You're not supposed to put generated files under revision control; just the
source and the script (or whatever) that generates the files.

Anyway, you can't avoid a set of graphic file for each equation unless you
can guarantee that the browser/renderer understands the math notation. Amaya
(http://www.w3.org/Amaya/) displays (some) MathML, is free (like in free
beer), but not suited for general consumption. IBM techexplorer
(http://www-4.ibm.com/software/network/techexplorer/) sports full support
for MathML 1.01 and also a large subset of LaTeX. Sebastian Rahtz'
PassiveTex (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~rahtz/passivetex/) can typeset MathML
rather well.

If you generate PostScript (EPS or PDF) by default for each LaTeX equation,
that won't cost you much in terms of storage, and is immediately useful for
print. Other presentation formats can be generated on demand from the
PostScript file.

If you go for MathML (or if you manage to somehow put the LaTeX source into
the document), you'll need a way to generate unique file names for generated
files. A nice trick is to derive the file names from a digest of the content
(i.e., MD5) of your math data. This can be used to cache rendering of the
math data.

Kind regards

Peter Ring


-----Original Message-----
From: Phillip Shelton [mailto:shelton@usq.edu.au]
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2001 2:30 AM
To: 'docbook@lists.oasis-open.org'
Subject: RE: FW: DOCBOOK: Equations.




> -----Original Message-----
> It's a quagmire really. If you need something robust today, 
> AFAIK, the best
> option is still to do math markup in latex and do a more or 
> less automatic
> generation of presentation formats (TIFF, PNG, EPS, whathaveyou). 

But I am a little wary of having lots of (it could be some 30-50) files of
size 16-600bytes on a system with 1K blocks as its smallest file storage
unit. That is 30+K for what might only be 2K of real data, and that is
before I have to go and put all this into RCS.

> Whether you display equations as bitmap graphic or PS/EPS 
> vector, there'll
> still be a problem with some uses of the document, because 
> what is -- in the
> source -- highly structured have become an opaque blob in the 
> presentation.
> You can't point to or from structural parts of the equation. 
> Also, how do
> you align the style (font, size) of the body text and the 
> style (font, size)
> of the equation?

Which is why we want the mark-up.  Though, you could use the present
textobject for the links as long as you did not mind the lack of automatic
propagation of changes.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: M. Wroth [mailto:mark@astrid.upland.ca.us]
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2001 3:25 PM
> To: Roman Suzi
> Cc: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: Re: FW: DOCBOOK: Equations.
> 
> 
> I'm at least generally aware of MathML.  But it's not part of 
> the DocBook 
> core, and I'd like support for equations to be part of the 
> core, not an 
> extension.
> 
> I seem to be a minority opinion, though :-)

There is at least two of us!

Phill

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