Typesetting for print

Although I didn't see any past discussion of print typography here,
there doesn't seem to be any place else to bring this up.

I would like to produce mathematical documents in an entirely XML
workflow. There are WYSIWYG editors that render SVG and MathML, several
good utilities for generating SVG illustrations, equation editors that
i/o MathML, and typsetting engines that take XML+SVG+MathML input.

My main problem is that I have been unable to get sufficient quality in
the typesetting of equations. I would prefer quality like TeX, but would
be satisfied with that of MS Word 2007. OpenOffice is definitely not
good enough.

I'm hoping to get some discussion here on what is available and how to
make best use of it.

The two commercial engines I've tried are Antenna House Formatter and
Prince XML. I was satisfied with both except for the equations. Why is
equation layout not better? Is it just a case of not putting enough work
into rendering equations, or is it actually harder to develop rendering
rules for MathML than for LaTeX? Maybe the capability is there but it
takes a deeper knowledge of the system. I looked but couldn't find any
discussion along those lines.

There are also the really expensive systems like Arbortext APP and SDL's
XML Professional Publisher. Do the big systems really render MathML with
TeX-like quality? Not that I could afford them, but I'd like to know if
what I want is even possible.

What else should I consider? I just want to output typeset PDFs from
XHTML/HTML5+SVG+MathML files. I have even tried "Print to PDF" in
Firefox. The equations were actually not too bad, but I doubt that any
amount of fiddling could produce production quality documents.

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Received on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 03:55:07 UTC