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Re: [Groff] Eqn creates a challenge for Mike(tm) Smith


From: Michael(tm) Smith
Subject: Re: [Groff] Eqn creates a challenge for Mike(tm) Smith
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 07:04:49 +0900
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11)

Hi Eric,

> @2007-02-07 16:17 -0500:
> Mike, I realized this morning that the existence of a MathML backend
> for eqn means you now need to write a stylesheet that transforms presentation
> MathML to eqn and add it to the standard set.

Actually, it's good to have this extra incentive to write such a
stylesheet. I want to make it as easy and attractive as possible
for more free-software people and projects to maintain the source
for their docs in DocBook and to use the DocBook stylesheets to
generate output from that source -- including using the manpages
stylesheet to generate their man-page output. And I can see that
having MathML support in the manpages stylesheet would help that.

> Otherwise, we'll be in a repeat of the unhappy situation with TBL.  Man pages
> will actually be preferred to DocBook as a composition format because you
> can move losslessly in only the one direction.

Yep. By the way, can you give some numbers on how many existing
man pages in your Red Hat corpus are using eqn markup?

> Fortunately, an implementation shouldn't be very difficult.  Certainly it
> will be easier than the TBL stylesheet for DocBook tables -- the models
> you're translating between will be much closer together.

OK, that's good to know.

> The hardest part will probably be implementing the MathML-entity-to-troff-
> special mappings.  I can give you a table of those.

Great -- I'd very much appreciate it. I'm sure I'll also need to
ask you some questions along the way. And I'll need some pointers
to pages to test with (existing pages that are using eqn).

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/




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