Planet MathML

XHTML—myths and reality. Useful overview of XHTML from Tina Holmboe of the W3C’s XHTML Working Group, which suggests considering HTML 4.01 strict unless you need mixed namespaces for things like MathML. I’ve been storing this blog’s content as XHTML but serving as HTML for several years now.

XHTML - myths and reality 11 hours ago Simon Willison : XHTML - myths and reality - XHTML—myths and reality. Useful overview of XHTML from Tina Holmboe of the W3C’s XHTML Working Group, which suggests considering HTML 4.01 strict unless you need mixed namespaces for things like MathML. I’ve been storing this blog’s content as X # copy

HopSlide (Open Source) ist eine HOP-Anwendung, um Präsentationen zu erstellen. Sie unterstützt Animationen, mathematische Formeln (MathML und TeX), SVG und HTML-Canvas. HopSlide kann nach XHTML überführt werden, um die Präsentationen in einem Cavas-fähigen Browser (Firefox, Safari) anzuzeigen. HopSlide ist die Präsentationssoftware für Menschen, die auf einen WYSIWYG-Editor verzichten können (z.B. LaTeX-Nutzer ). [Zum dritten Mal Peter van I. per Email.] Ich bin ja eigentlich mit S5 recht zuf

Distributed Extensibility Submitted by Shelley on Fri, 10/03/2008 - 09:27 Tagged: Standards While I appreciate Mark Pilgrim's This week in HTML5 land weekly reports, there's one underlying thread that occurs every month that Mark doesn't necessarily touch on: the issue of distributed extensibility. You know, the namespace, XHTML, SVG and MathML et al thing that doesn't go away. For instance, catching up on my HTML5 Working Group public archives reading, I found this gem from Chris Wilso

HopSlide is a HOP tool for authoring and playing slides. It supports animations, annotations (slide overlays), math formulas (MathML support and TeX syntax support), SVG images, and canvas graphical effects. HopSlide can be used to compile slides into XHTML files. These files can be used by XHTML capable browsers (e.g., Firefox). Compiled slides files can be used to play the slides without HopSlide. animations annotation browsers effects Firefox formulas HOP HopSlide images slides SVG syntax XH

I had an itch that needed scratching... I needed to render equations on the web and I didn't want to rely on something like MathML because of poor browser coverage. So, I created The Equationater. Type in an equation in LaTeX format and it is instantly turned into a PNG file that you can download or link to. Here's a quick example: Note. The Equationater is an equal opportunity renderer... it doesn't discriminate against inequalities.

One subject that seems to come up every other month or so is how RichEdit tables work. So I might as well post the answer. Hopefully RichEdit tables will eventually be described in the Windows SDK. They are not directly related to Math in Office, but I had mathematical expressions in mind when designing RichEdit’s table facility. Both mathematics and tables are recursive. For example you can have a fraction in the numerator of another fraction, and you can have a table in the cell of another table. So implementing tables seemed like a useful project that might also reveal how to implement a WYSIWYG implementation of mathematics. In fact, MathML <mtable>’s have a lot in common with general tables.

 

Most people at the time (1999) were recommending that a table cell should be represented by a whole RichEdit instance, which would give great generality. But I wanted a model that was much smaller, faster and worked with the built-in Find/Replace functionality and the RTF file converters. To this end, we needed a model, like Word’s, that was part of a single document instance, and could be overlaid on the existing paragraph structure. Accordingly RichEdit's table implementation is very efficient and fast, in fact, much faster than Word’s (although less general). Improvements have been made over the years, but the discussion that follows applies to RichEdit 4.0, which shipped with Office 2002, and RichEdit 4.1, which ships with Windows XP and Vista to this day. It also applies to later versions that ship with Office 2003 & 2007, which have additional features..

 

Specifically a cell containing a single line of text is represented only by that text, not by some larger structure. An empty cell consists of the single character, the cell mark U+0007. A cell containing multiple lines of text is expressed in terms of a structure that is substantially smaller than a complete edit instance, followed by the CELL mark. Tables can be nested up to 15 levels deep; higher nestings are represented by tab-delimited text. Cells can contain multiple paragraphs of any kind, e.g., bidirectional text, arbitrary tabs and alignments.

 

The Spring of 1999 was shortly after the Unicode Technical Committee added the U+FFF9..U+FFFB delimiter characters for describing ruby text in Japanese. These characters were available for more general use and seemed ideal for RichEdit’s internal table structure. This choice preceded the addition of the internal-use-only U+FDDO..U+FDEF characters that we use for mathematical structure characters, among other things.

 

In the (in-memory) backing store, a table row has the form

 

    {CR...}CR

 

where { stands for the Unicode STARTGROUP character U+FFF9, and CR  is the ASCII Carriage Return character U+000D. The delimiter } stands for the Unicode ENDGROUP character U+FFFB and ... stands for a sequence of cells, each consisting of cell text terminated by the CELL mark U+0007. For example, a row with three empty cells has the plain text understructure U+FFF9 U+000D U+0007 U+0007 U+0007 U+FFFB U+000D. The start and end group character pairs are assigned identical PARAFORMAT2 information that describe the row and cell parameters.  If rows with different parameters are needed, they may follow one another with appropriate PARAFORMAT2 parameters. A horizontally or vertically merged cell has two characters: NOTACHAR (0xFFFF) followed by CELL (0x7). Any text that appears in a merged cell is stored in the first cell of the set of merged cells.

 

One way to insert tables is to copy/paste tables from Word. RichEdit reads and writes table RTF. For more programmatic purposes, RichEdit 4.0 introduced the message EM_INSERTTABLEROW, which acts similarly to EM_REPLACESEL but inserts one or more table rows with empty cells instead of plain text. Specifically it deletes the text (if any) currently selected by the selection and then inserts empty table row(s) with the row and cell parameters given by wparam and lparam, respectively, as defined below. It leaves the selection pointing to the start of the first cell in the first row. The client can then populate the table cells by pointing the selection at the various cell end marks and inserting and formatting the desired text. Such text can include nested table rows, etc. Since wparam and lparam point at row and cell parameter structures, this API isn't compatible with Visual Basic and can't be easily added to RichEdit’s object model TOM, although TOM2 does have a general set of table interfaces.

 

The TABLEROWPARMS and TABLECELLPARMS structures are defined as

 

typedef struct _tableRowParms

{                           // EM_INSERTTABLE wparam is a (TABLEROWPARMS *)

    BYTE    cbRow;          // Count of bytes in this structure

    BYTE    cbCell;         // Count of bytes in TABLECELLPARMS

    BYTE    cCell;          // Count of cells

    BYTE    cRow;           // Count of rows

    LONG    dxCellMargin;   // Cell left/right margin (\trgaph)

    LONG    dxIndent;       // Row left (right if fRTL indent (similar to \trleft)

    LONG    dyHeight;       // Row height (\trrh)

    DWORD   nAlignment:3;   // Row alignment (like PARAFORMAT::bAlignment,

                            //  \trql, trqr, \trqc)

    DWORD   fRTL:1;         // Display cells in RTL order (\rtlrow)

    DWORD   fKeep:1;        // Keep row together (\trkeep}

    DWORD   fKeepFollow:1;  // Keep row on same page as following row (\trkeepfollow)

    DWORD   fWrap:1;        // Wrap text to right/left (depending on bAlignment)

                            // (see \tdfrmtxtLeftN, \tdfrmtxtRightN)

    DWORD   fIdentCells:1;  // lparam points at single struct valid for all cells

} TABLEROWPARMS;

 

typedef struct _tableCellParms

{                           // EM_INSERTTABLE lparam is a (TABLECELLPARMS *)

    LONG    dxWidth;        // Cell width (\cellx)

    WORD    nVertAlign:2;   // Vertical alignment (0/1/2 = top/center/bottom

                            //  \clvertalt (def), \clvertalc, \clvertalb)

    WORD    fMergeTop:1;    // Top cell for vertical merge (\clvmgf)

    WORD    fMergePrev:1;   // Merge with cell above (\clvmrg)

    WORD    fVertical:1;    // Display text top to bottom, right to left (\cltxtbrlv)

    WORD    wShading;       // Shading in .01% (\clshdng) e.g., 10000 flips fore/back

 

    SHORT   dxBrdrLeft;     // Left border width (\clbrdrl\brdrwN) (in twips)

    SHORT   dyBrdrTop;      // Top border width  (\clbrdrt\brdrwN)

    SHORT   dxBrdrRight;    // Right border width (\clbrdrr\brdrwN)

    SHORT   dyBrdrBottom;   // Bottom border width (\clbrdrb\brdrwN)

    COLORREF crBrdrLeft;    // Left border color (\clbrdrl\brdrcf)

    COLORREF crBrdrTop;     // Top border color (\clbrdrt\brdrcf)

    COLORREF crBrdrRight;   // Right border color (\clbrdrr\brdrcf)

    COLORREF crBrdrBottom;  // Bottom border color (\clbrdrb\brdrcf)

    COLORREF crBackPat;     // Background color (\clcbpat)

    COLORREF crForePat;     // Foreground color (\clcfpat)

} TABLECELLPARMS;

 

Note that paragraph-format information containing the TABLEROWPARMS and TABLECELLPARMS information is attached to the table-row delimiters as set up by the EM_ INSERTTABLEROW message, so merely duplicating the plain-text table structure in the backing store isn't enough to insert a working table. In fact, methods like ITextRange::SetText() convert the special delimiters U+FFF9.U+FFFB to spaces (U+0020). Note also that this table structure is nestable.

 

The definition of EM_INSERTTABLEROW is extensible, since in the future we'll probably have to support more parameters for table rows and cells. The API also inserts a consistent table row all at once, so that no illegal table parts are present on return. Hence if the document is saved after such an insertion, valid Word-compatible RTF will be written. lparam points at the TABLECELLPARMS structure for the first cell in an array of TABLECELLPARMS structures.  It's important that cbCell = sizeof(TABLECELLPARMS).  That way RichEdit knows how much cell information the client is specifying.  In particular, in the future if more cell parameters are defined, older clients can get away with specifying less and the new RichEdit can assign default values for the new parameters.  Similarly cbRow says how many bytes are defined by the client for TABLEROWPARMS, in case RichEdit is revised to support more row parameters that the client doesn't know about.

 

To make simple tables easier to define, if fIdenticalCells = 1, lparam points at a single TABLECELLPARMS structure that is valid for all cells in the row.  Note that a nonzero cell border width is guaranteed to give at least a one-pixel border.

 

The colors are limited to the standard 16 colors defined by

 

      RGB(  0,   0,   0),     // \red0\green0\blue0

      RGB(  0,   0, 255),     // \red0\green0\blue255

      RGB(  0, 255, 255),     // \red0\green255\blue255

      RGB(  0, 255,   0),     // \red0\green255\blue0

      RGB(255,   0, 255),     // \red255\green0\blue255

      RGB(255,   0,   0),     // \red255\green0\blue0

      RGB(255, 255,   0),     // \red255\green255\blue0

      RGB(255, 255, 255),     // \red255\green255\blue255

      RGB(  0,   0, 128),     // \red0\green0\blue128

      RGB(  0, 128, 128),     // \red0\green128\blue128

      RGB(  0, 128,   0),     // \red0\green128\blue0

      RGB(128,   0, 128),     // \red128\green0\blue128

      RGB(128,   0,   0),     // \red128\green0\blue0

      RGB(128, 128,   0),     // \red128\green128\blue0

      RGB(128, 128, 128),     // \red128\green128\blue128

      RGB(192, 192, 192),     // \red192\green192\blue192

 

plus two custom colors. The border widths are limited to the range 0 to 255 twips.

 

If the color index is not in the range 1..18, then autocolor is used, which usually ends up being the system Text or Background colors.

Last message posted by David Carlisle

Message posted by William F Hammond

Two very interesting developments are happening that will improve Word 2007’s MathML support. The first is key for helping in getting Word 2007 math text into the scientific and technical publisher workflows and the second may help in this regard too. Specifically new transforms are now available in beta versions enabling Word to read and write MathML. These XSLT files are responsible for converting between Word’s native math format OMML and MathML 2.0. If you’d like to try out the new files (omml2mml.xsl and mml2omml.xsl), you can download them from the Microsoft Connect site using the invitation code: 0707-84P4-DPWT. Once you’ve downloaded the files, copy them to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 subdirectory, or wherever winword.exe is. Before doing so, you might want to change the current omml2mml.xsl and mml2omml.xsl files to omml2mml.xsl.bak and mml2omml.xsl.bak, respectively, in case you want to back out the update at a later date. But I doubt you will. The new ones are significantly better.

 

The second development is that Word 2007 will have a service pack release that enables it to read and write the ISO standard odf files as well as the native ISO standard OOXML files. In the odf standard, math zones are represented by MathML 2.0. So when Word converts to and from odf, it will use MathML 2.0 for all math zones. And it will use the files above to do the translations.

The Math Working Group published a new version of the draft XML Entity definitions for Characters. The specification defines names for many Unicode symbols. The names can be used in MathML if the use of the symbols themselves is inconvenient or impossible. The list of names is a superset of the list defined by HTML. The specification includes DTDs to include the names in other XML-based formats and also XSLT2 scripts to convert symbols to names.

Last message posted by Hoag, Regina

Message posted by Hoag, Regina

Message posted by Bill Corwin

I recently had a very simple request… soooo simple: our user just wishes to copy the formula from Mathematica (which can copy it in MathML) and paste it on something that does web.

I just went around and tried… SeaMonkey should support that in editor and reader: copy a piece of HTML with MathML and paste it, didn’t even work… my 1/x became a place full of nbsps in three lines!

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There’s a wind for more content construction in the ActiveMath group, with at least two projects at the University focussed on creating content (and a adapt platform and…). And MathML starts to play an important role there.

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DocBook to LaTeX Publishing transforms your SGML/XML DocBook documents to DVI, PostScript or PDF by translating them in pure LaTeX as a first process. MathML 2.0 markups are supported too. It started as a clone of DB2LaTeX. (0 comments)

The Math Working Group has set up a syndicator for MathML-related news, called “Planet MathML.” It includes news about Math software, news from the Math WG itself (of course), blog entries written by working group members, and articles from the <www-math@w3.org> mailing list and elsewhere.