- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 00:24:18 +0300
On May 29, 2006, at 22:56, Mihai Sucan wrote: > Another different take: > If LaTeX is considered to be the best available language for > writing mathematical scientific documents, and the best for > printing too... why not have user agents implement it? IIRC, IBM tried it as a plug-in in the Netscape 4 era. Netscape plug- ins had to be shipped separately, had no baseline integration with the surrounding text, couldn't read the input code from the host document, etc. I think the following could be technically feasible: 1) Author writes iTeX code as the text content of an <f> element for inline formulae (and <df> for display formulae; two elements to cut down on verbosity of attributes). 2) The browser takes the textContent of the <f> element and the computed style for the list of fonts, the text color and the font size. 3) The browser feeds this data to a sandboxed, pruned and heavily macro-deprived pdfLaTeX engine that renders the formula using the font properties as if the formula was a $...$ formula on an infinite line. (This means that line breaks cannot occur in formulae. Consider this a good enough approach for feasibility.) 4) The pdfLaTeX engine hands back a PDF with a bounding box indicating the bounds of the rendering and the position of the baseline. 5) The browser's CSS formatter replaces the box of the <f> element with a replaced element box of the size of the PDF bounding box and aligns the baseline of the replacement box with the baseline of the surrounding CSS line box. 6) When it is time to draw, the browser draws the drawing operations encapsulated in the PDF into its underlying vector graphics pipeline. Obviously, architecturally this would be a departure from DOM and CSS, but it could work. And because I guess the implementation would take more than a couple of days, I am not volunteering to prototype this. :-) -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 29 May 2006 14:24:18 UTC