Re: [Bug-gnupedia] math content

[Tom Chance]

I seems to me that the best way to go with this is to
let the author write it in MathML or LaTex or as a gif
or png, and just make sure the server can deal with
each. So if you uploaded a MathML or LaTex document,
you would tick a radio option on the upload page
saying so, and it'd be uploaded into a directory ready
to be converted into a gif+put into the pics
directory, or into html ready to be put into the main
article. But the latter would be tricky to do. I would
suggest that in the upload form it has a "browse"
function to upload pictures of mathematical
expressions or whatever else people might use, with an
option for each type, and they are all converted into
gifs/pngs/jpegs and stuck on an ftp server for
pictures. A reference (img src=) is simply written in
the article for the picture. So if you uploaded an
article with pythag.tex attached, you'd put "img
src=pythag.gif" into the middle of your article where
you want the picture, and that would be parsed by the
perl intepreter and treated as a proper image. 

Either way, I think we're definitely going to need the
ability to interpret large numbers of filetypes with
perl, or we'll have to impose restrictions on file
types that can be used in articles, which could get
very tricky... which ones do we allow? As they have to
be compatible with every browser out there (except
perhaps lynx!). 

Thom Chance 


--- "Thomas E. Vaughan" <address@hidden>
wrote: > On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 06:11:04PM -0000,
Duncan
> Lock wrote:
> >
> > I am not a mathematician but I looked into this a
> while ago for another
> > project. I would say MathML is the way to go here.
> Unfortunatly it isn't
> > very well supported in browsers at the moment.
> IE4/5 half arsedly
> > supports it and Mozilla aslo has some support
> (although I can't remember
> > how much) As for creating MathML content you've
> got even less choice
> > really. On the free front you could look at amaya
> from the wc3 no less
> > (www.w3.org) which is CLUNKY but will produce
> MathML (amongst other
> > things) Maybe MathML on the backend but translated
> to something else (an
> > image?) for the client end?
> 
> It seems to me that there are three client ends, or
> one client end with
> three heads:
> 
> (1) what the user's browser gets when the user
> clicks on a link to an
>     article in the encyclopedia,
> 
> (2) what the user submits in order to search the
> encyclopedia, and
> 
> (3) what the author submits in order to add content
> to the encyclopedia.
> 
> Even if MathML doesn't (initially) play a role in
> any of these, MathML may
> still be useful as an internal format if it provides
> us a standard way to
> store mathematical content so that it is searchable.
> 
> Surely, though, almost all substantial mathematical
> content will be typed
> up by the author in (La)TeX, and so what we'll need
> is some software that
> will convert at least the formulas in a TeX document
> into MathML.  For
> example, if latex2html could produce not only a PNG
> image file for each
> formula but also MathML for each formula, then we
> would have the
> flexibility to serve in-line either a nicely
> antialiased image or MathML
> code to the user's browser.  Even if it is not
> served out directly, the
> MathML could, unlike graphic images, be queried for
> certain mathematical
> expressions in an as-yet undetermined way.
> 
> -- 
> Thomas E. Vaughan <address@hidden>
> CIMMS/NSSL, Norman, OK, USA
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Bug-gnupedia mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnupedia


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