Re: rendering entities

Stephan.Semirat@ac-grenoble.fr wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>> > i'd like to know if there's a way to change the default rendering of
>> > mathml entities (e.g. rendering ⅆ as a roman d instead
>> > of a blackboard d) under FireFox and IE+MathPlayer.
>>
>> Possibly it's possible to set up the font choices to select a font
>> witha d rather than a d| but I tend to do it a simpler way, just
>> use d in the source file. Thw blackboard bold operators are there if you
>> want to use them but there is no obligation to use them if you don't
want to,
>> you can use whatever name you want for any operator.
>
> Thank you. Is that what you mean : ⅆ and d are just
characters with no "content" meaning ?
>
> However, if for instance i want to translate my xhtml+mathml files to
tex, then &DifferentialD will be translated to \dd while d will be
translated to d.
> So i need to encode these two letter differently, no ?
>
> (i could also use roman mstyle for d,e,i instead of DifferentialD,
exponentialE,
> imaginaryI but in fact, these entities are usefull and meaningfull (to
the end user i
> am) ; it's just that their rendering is not very conventionnal...)

I can understand Carlisle advice. He come from the TeX community and the
use of tricks for forcing a correct _visual_ rendering in Tex/LaTeX is
common.

However, we cannot accept his advice. Whereas d is just a character with
maybe some meaning obtained from different tokenization -<mo>d</mo> is
different of <mi>d</mi> for instance-, &DifferentialD; is not a plain
character. It has a well defined semantic meaning and way be used. From
the MathML specification

[http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-MathML2-20031021/chapter3.html#id.3.2.5.6]:

<blockquote>3.2.5.6 Names for other special operators

MathML also includes &DifferentialD; for use in an mo element representing
the differential operator symbol usually denoted by "d". The reasons for
explicitly using this special entity are similar to those for using the
special entities for invisible operators described in the preceding
section.</blockquote>

If one uses <mo>d</mo> for visual simulation of differentials then final
MathML code is less accessible (and also less searchable) that the old
model HTML + GIF + ALT.

> Regards,
> Stéphan


Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

Received on Thursday, 20 April 2006 17:11:06 UTC