On Mon, 2002-03-25 at 23:30, Bruce Koehn wrote: > Abiword could become the darling of the scientific world > if it could handle mathematical notation in a manner similar > to TeX. > > 1. The scientific world, especially those funded by grants, avoid > using MS-Word because it isn't free. So compatibility with MS-Word > is a non-issue (or at least not an important issue). > > 2. The very low cost of Abiword is attractive to poor scientists. > > 3. Cross platform compatibility would make life much easier since > such a variety of platforms are used in the scientific world. > > 4. Internationalization is another driver because scientists tend > to communinicate internationally. > > 5. Except for mathematical constructs, TeX and LaTeX are difficult > to use well. Merging the best of Abiword and TeX makes sense. > > 6. XML would be apealing to many scientists who prefer the ability > to use a text editor for much of their authoring work. > > I don't know if XML has tags for producing mathematical text ala > TeX but such tags should not be hard to define.
Just to remove any confusion, XML is a generic stuff. You can do virtually everything in XML: drawing, preference files, text layout, text content, programming, RPC, maths. XML is just a way to format those descriptive data. Read XML does not mean "I understand any XML file". Yes, this feature is planned, but a post 1.0 release, don't know which one. And we don't know yet how it will be done. Hub
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