Re: Gnome Help Browser 2 - MathML

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Thomas Canty wrote:

> Hello peoples,
> 
> I did some investigation after people inquired about the use of MathML
> in docs.
> 
> Mozilla has the ability to render mathML, provided support for mathML
> is compiled in. I downloaded mozilla with mathML compiled in, and it
> does look impressive.

[SNIP]

> Docbook provides an example of an alternative method, to introduce
> simple mathematical equations, have a look at
> http://www.docbook.org/tdg/html/equation.html -> the example at the
> bottom which uses a screenshot to display mathematical formula. This
> is not ideal for either inline formulas and symbols or documents with
> a lot of mathematical display in them

Thanks for the great research.  That makes things a lot easier for the
rest of us.  I really like the mathML support in Mozilla - the output is
not as good at LaTeX, but does the job nicely.

I think we probably want to stick with using the plain DocBook solution
(provide an image of the rendered equation).  We can do either <equation>
or <inlineequation>.  The advantage here is that we are completely DocBook
compliant - so any browser that can display DocBook will be able to
display it.  It will remove the assumption that we have a mathML-enabled
browser.  We really need to remain DocBook compliant, as this is the
standard and some people will want to read the documentation from another
browser, such as KDE's.

The only problem that remains is that documentation writers need to be
able to produce nice-looking images for their equations.  I would
recommend using LaTeX for this:

1) Create a file called foo.tex containing:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
$a=b^2$
\end{document}

(Replacing the equation $a=b^2$ with your equation.)
2) latex foo.tex
3) dvips -E -o foo.eps foo.dvi

At this point, you have a nice EPS image of your equation.  I'm not too
good with gs, so I use convert to make the png's:

4) convert -density 100x100 foo.eps foo.png

To change the size, just tweak the density or use the geometry option.

Dan