Re: Typesetting for print

On 18/01/2012 03:54, Wendell P wrote:
> 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.
>




How to typeset the mathematics depends a bit on how you want to typeset
the rest of the document. Apart from commercial solutions mentioned
there are for example various methods of converting MathML to TeX, but
these are probably of most interest if you are typesetting the entire
document via TeX. (The pdf version of the MathML spec [1]is typeset via
that route for example) At NAG we typeset our pdf using 3b2/APP from XMl
sources including mathml (using an in-house developed 3b2 stylesheet,
although I believe 3b2 ships with MathML styles these days).
see for example [2]. I was a bit surprised to learn on g+ the other day
that my old xmltex system was still being used for commercial publishing
of xml via TeX[3], personally I'd always convert the XML to TeX via XSLT
rather than get TeX to parse the XML (which is what xmltex does) but it
still shows that it's perfectly possible to get TeX quality typesetting
out of MathML, not least by using TeX to do the typesetting.

If word is an option, as you say, then it comes with built in 
conversions from MathMl to its internal oomml format.

If you need to integrate Math typesetting into an existing typesetting
workflow it depends what they can support, it might make sense for
example to convert to svg (there are some xslt stylesheets available for
that, or the mathjax project is I think working on an svg back end to
the mathjax system.

David

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/mathml.pdf
[2] http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/fl/nagdoc_fl23/pdf/A02/a02aaf.pdf
[3] https://plus.google.com/u/0/107847268022850354754/posts/F4pimcitjFd




________________________________________________________________________
The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England
and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is:
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom.

This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is
powered by MessageLabs. 
________________________________________________________________________

Received on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 12:42:48 UTC