MathML, Firefox, and Firemath [LWN.net]

MathML, Firefox, and Firemath

Posted May 6, 2011 6:48 UTC (Fri) by augustm (guest, #41831)
Parent article: MathML, Firefox, and Firemath

This reminds me of the posting by a member of the MathML committee
in the time of Netscape. A latex user was asking how to convert a paper
in order to create a nice web document. The answer was

1) Latex is the problem, not part of the solution

2) Mathematica is built with a WYSIWYG editor, and is the future-
because the mathml expressions are too complicated to type by hand.

As a scientist who has written books in latex- this sounds like
telling Linus to use VisualBasic to write the kernel- it is so
much more productive and high level.... how can you not prefer it?

How is mathml, 10 years later helping a scientist produce a substantial
text? A book, a 50 page handout for students?

How can one integrate the millions of documents available at http://arxiv.org/

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MathML, Firefox, and Firemath

Posted May 12, 2011 16:12 UTC (Thu) by davidcarlisle (guest, #74878) [Link]

> How is mathml, 10 years later helping a scientist produce a substantial
> text? A book, a 50 page handout for students?

It's probably not helping a lot in the production (unless it's a collaborative work with some people using tex, some MS Word, some openoffice, some... and you need a common communication format).

So let's assume for the sake of argument that the book is written in LaTeX.

In 1985 the author would have been happy to get that LaTeX typeset on to paper and the book published, but these days many people still want that, but also want online versions, version that meet legal or moral requirements for accessible renderings to audio or braille, versions that dynamically reflow in a web browser...

MathML has a lot of element markup but that is needed in a browser environment as that's how you address things via css, and makes it much easier to address things in javascript etc.

Conversion to mathml either offline with things like tex4ht or latexml or for more constrained input within the browser with asciimathml or mathjax is eminently possible and doesn't require you to throw away the latex skills.

> How can one integrate the millions of documents available at http://arxiv.org/
there are existing projects underway to convert sections of that to mathml
using latexml as having xhtml (or html5) versions of documents have many advantages when offered as an addition rather than a replacement for the exactly faithful but statically typeset TeX renderings to pdf.