Mailing List Archive: docbook and math

Hi folks,

and especially those that are proficient with docbook ;) I have one
question. I am thinking about a series of design papers. I think,
however, that at least some of them will require a lot of mathematical
formulas. Typically, I'd say that should be done in LaTeX. But with
moving to docbook for the user doc, it may be good to use a single
system.

I have now investigated docbook and maths a bit, but what I found didn't
look very promising. The best I found was MathML, which is far too
verbose for any hand-editing (and I don't want to rely on specialized
formula editors). I also found some references to embedded TeX, but that
looked quite hackish.

Could somebody enlighten me on the current typical approach for such
papers? Do they still usually go the LaTeX way or is there a good way to
do it with docbook?

Many thanks in advance,
Rainer

Hi,

I don't have enough experience with docbook and math formulas but LaTeX
might be better for now unfortunatelly, I guess.

If you go with docbook, current dtd-based docbook (4.x) does not well
with MathML natively and you might have to convert math formula to some
formats of image somehow. There may be two choices.

1) write math formulas in LaTex and convert to images (EPS, PNG, ...)
2) write math formulas in MathML and convert to images (SVG, ...)

Here are some related links.

* http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/MathML.html
* http://www.grigoriev.ru/svgmath/
* http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/SVGimages.html

IIWM, I would choose 2) (mathml -> svg) and try svgmath.

Other random notes about MathML:

* OpenOffice.org-Math supports MathML output.

* Gecho based browsers (e.g. firefox) can display MathML docs.
* http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/authoring.html
* http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/ (MathML fonts)

* MathML has two ways to markup; contents markup and presentation
markup. MathMLc2p
(http://www.lri.fr/~pietriga/mathmlc2p/mathmlc2p.html) might
help if you have to transform from the former into the later.

- satoru

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 03:27:49PM +0200, Rainer Gerhards wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> and especially those that are proficient with docbook ;) I have one
> question. I am thinking about a series of design papers. I think,
> however, that at least some of them will require a lot of mathematical
> formulas. Typically, I'd say that should be done in LaTeX. But with
> moving to docbook for the user doc, it may be good to use a single
> system.
>
> I have now investigated docbook and maths a bit, but what I found didn't
> look very promising. The best I found was MathML, which is far too
> verbose for any hand-editing (and I don't want to rely on specialized
> formula editors). I also found some references to embedded TeX, but that
> looked quite hackish.
>
> Could somebody enlighten me on the current typical approach for such
> papers? Do they still usually go the LaTeX way or is there a good way to
> do it with docbook?
>
> Many thanks in advance,
> Rainer