Re: comments re draft version 2.0

> I believe that the technique of special-loaded DVI's knows
> no bounds other than an author's reasonable patience (and the danger
> of overloading the design of DVI).

I think you need to keep two things distinct,

One is having a tex like syntax (or real tex syntax) for MathML, which
allows new mathML content to be authored but in a more compact style and
by people and tools familiar with TeX. For such usage it is certainly
possible (and would be useful, but not I think completely done yet) to
specify a tex vocabulary that allowed perfect exact translation to
presentation and/or Content MathML (possibly including csymbol
extensions as outlined by Stan) and back to TeX. One may use a tex to
xml converter as the basis of such a tool, or a radical SGML declaration
to make an SGML system understand tex like syntax (about which you could
say more than me:-)

The other problem is translating `legacy' documents to MathML (where
legacy includes a reasonable proportion of future documents until
authors are brainwashed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H trained into new
practices. One may use the same kind of tools (eg tex4ht) as a basis
for these translations but mapping to presentation MathML is probably
the only option here and it is essentially a completely different
problem.

In my own case I hope to first use tex4ht to get to presentation MathML,
and then use XSL and some knowledge about the subject matter of the
document to convert the presentation MathML to Content markup. But this
last stage is hard to do in general, It's easier if you have individual
knowledge about the subject area of the document.

David

Received on Tuesday, 11 April 2000 14:56:22 UTC