# Re: Mathematical selection

From: W Naylor <wn@cs.bath.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 12:20:54 +0100 (BST)
To: Paul Libbrecht <paul@activemath.org>
cc: m.kohlhase@iu-bremen.de, Public MathML mailing list <www-math@w3.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0603301210200.22756@ralph.cs.bath.ac.uk>

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Paul Libbrecht wrote:

> > Of course, you will only realistically get parallel markup, if you
> > generate it from content-oriented methods anyway :-).
> The bone question is whether level 1 is still sensible... I sort of believe
> that if this is implemented, authors (and gui-editors) will put more brackets
> mrows... otherwise, we can,
>
> Can producers of plain MathML-presentation speak about it ?
> Are there situations where such a sub-term selection would be worse than the
> text selection?

I though to try out the ORCCA tex -> MathML translator on your example:

I input the document:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}

\begin{document}
$$3*a+b$$
\end{document}

and get out the MathML:

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="block" overflow="scroll">
<mn>3</mn>
<mo>*</mo>
<mi>a</mi>
<mo>+</mo>
<mi>b</mi>
[/itex]

now this is machine generated, (though I suspect that many authors would
be lazy and wouldn't put an mrow around the 3*a, if they were creating
this by hand)

In order for the machine generated MathML to include mrows at the
appropriate places, it would be necessary to pay attention to precedence
rules. It strikes me that though many of these are fairly universal, we
hit the usual ambiguity of presentation mathematics problem. Maybe this
could be circumvented using configuration files of some sort.

One thing seems certain however, that is that there is a need for tools to
perform translations (like adding mrows in the appropriate places etc.)

Bill

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Received on Thursday, 30 March 2006 11:21:31 UTC

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