gellmu update, version 0.8.4

I'm pleased to announce that a significant update of GELLMU,
version 0.8.4, has been released at http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/gellmu/
and posted to CTAN where it may be found in support/gellmu.

GELLMU stands for "Generalized Extensible LaTeX-Like MarkUp",
which is the use of markup like that of LaTeX to write for
SGML and XML document types.

The package includes software for an XML document type (which may be
written in LaTeX-like markup) that emulates much of LaTeX article
while admitting robust translation to XHTML+MathML.

One important change in this update is revised internal handling of
mathematical prime accents.  In most cases old source files will not
require change.

Manuals have been updated for the first time since 2004.

An excerpt from the README file follows.

                                    -- Bill

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CHANGES IN VERSION 0.8.4 (5 July 2007)

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"Regular" GELLMU:

About 30 new commands have been added, mostly mathematical, including
more arrows, more dots, as well as "\prime" and "\backprime"
(emulating the corresponding AMS LaTeX names).  Also "itimes"
(invisible times) and "icomma" (invisible comma) join "aF" (invisible
applyFunction) for optional use as weak semantic hints.

The handling of mathematical prime accents has been completely revised
in order that the XHTML+MathML formatting will work better with the
(largely undocumented) handling of the corresponding unicode data
points in the web browsers that support MathML.  In only a few cases,
however, will legacy source files require change.  In this connection,
there is now an explicit rule for distinguishing in _regular_ GELLMU
source between uses of the character "'" as (a) apostrophe (\apos)
and (b) right-single-quote (\rsq): it's an apostrophe if and only if
it is followed by a "word-character" (as determined according to the
sense of that term for regular expression handling in GNU Emacs).
Sequences of two, three or four "'" characters become \rdq, \rtq,
or \rqq, respectively, unless, with the first of these the string
"''" is found to balance a previous string "``" in which case the
markup \quophrase{} is still generated.  (Moreover, matching pairs of
"`" and "'" still generate \squophrase{} when that is enabled by
certain manners of calling the syntactic translator.)

The handling of limits for sums, integrals, and products has been
revised beginning with a document type definition revision which
should be compatible with old source files that passed correctly
through the production stream.  Although processing toward the LaTeX
and XHTML+MathML formats had been "working", there were errors in the
classic HTML handling of these limits resulting from the fact that the
SGML/XML content models for \sum, \int, and \prod had been inadequate.

By default links, internal and external, found in \text{} in math mode
are now set using xlink rather than using an XML namespace switch to
enable HTML anchors.  This is tied to the environmental variable
GELLMU_XLink.  Also the previous limited handling of bold and italic
style in \text{} in math mode has also been revised to treatment that,
though less elegant, avoids namespace switching.

When XHTML+MathML output is produced, but regardless of the
availabilty of "dtd" validation, the production stream provides a
"child-count" checker for certain MathML elements.  It is intended
that this particular step, like the XML conformance check, will work
without reference to any formal document type definition.
Consequently, the use of classical HTML named entity references has
been eliminated.

Width specification for tabular p-cells is now supported in HTML and
XHTML using CSS style attributes.

There have been some miscellaneous revisions of the limited
representation of mathematics in the classic HTML formatting, and
there have been numerous bug fixes and minor improvements in all of
the various components of the "regular" production stream.

---

Syntactic translator:

Improved diagnostics for handling mismatched arguments in \newcommand
invocations.

For the context of "regular" GELLMU: (1) elaborated handling of prime
accents and (2) stronger efforts to diagnose unbalanced '$' characters
for toggling in and out of inline math zones.

Correction of a bug related to the signaling of an error when an
opening balancing character cannot be matched and elimination of the
unwanted double announcement of line numbers with many error messages.

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Received on Monday, 9 July 2007 16:29:31 UTC