Re: The gnome-help.2

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

I wouldn't expect MathML to be implemented. First, all docs are
written in DocBook, and I do not know of any way to combine MathML
with DocBook (I may be wrong, of course). Second, MathML is pretty new
and not supported by majority of browsers. I'd assume that it would
require too much work from developers to make Nautilus render MathML
properly. 

On the other hand, some things (like sub/superscripts, and many math
symbols, such as arrows, sum and product sign, etc) are possible with
standard DocBook - they are defined as entities, see files
/usr/lib/sgml/ISOams*. E.g., the sum sign is ∑. The right question
is, of course, to make sure that docbook2html converter which will be
used for gnome 2.0 understands these entities and produces html which
is properly rendered by Nautilus and other browsers. We should mention
this to jrb, who is working on this converter. 



Sasha

PS. I wish this whole documentation system were based on Latex rather
than DocBook - it would give so much more freedom, and I like LaTeX
much, much more... But of course, it is too late to cahnge it now, and
would create other serious diffculties


On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 09:42:06AM +1000, Phillip J Shelton wrote:
> My immediate problem is I am sort of thinking I might help the gnumeric
> project out by writing up some of the documentation of the functions that
> gnumeric uses. Now, most of these are of a mathematical flavour. What with
> the large set of statistic functions and the engineering and trigomeritical
> (sorry about the spelling) functions there is a lot of maths. It would be
> very nice if this could be rendered to look like maths properly.
>