It doesn't really matter if TeX is a good or bad idea for writing maths. For our users, they might do a formula if it's TeX, they won't if it's something else.
-- Lennart On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Wolfgang Jeltsch <g9ks1...@acme.softbase.org> wrote: > Am Freitag, 6. Februar 2009 11:31 schrieb George Pollard: >> I think that the TeX *language* is great for writing mathematics, >> but that we should be wary of blindly incorporating TeX *output* >> into Haddock. >> >> Most of Haddock's documentation is currently HTML-based, and >> if we add TeX mathematics in the usual way (i.e. embedding images) >> it is very 'inaccessible content' (no selection, scaling, and a myriad >> of other small niggles) compared to the rest of the HTML file. >> My thoughts would be to use the TeX engine itself for when generating >> high-quality PDF documentation, and have something else translate TeX >> to (e.g.) MathML for the HTML pages. There are various programs to do this >> (or it could be done in Haskell :D!) > > TeX is not so great for mathematics and especially not for conversion into > MathML (which would be needed for HTML output). The TeX math language > provides rather little semantic information. As input language for the > concrete software named TeX this is mostly okay since the concrete rendering > algorithm of TeX doesn't need certain information (for example, about > implicit bracketing). > > However, even for rendering with TeX, you sometimes have to ressort to ugly > tricks since TeX sometimes misinterprets what you wrote. Knuth gives some > examples in chapter 18 of The TeXbook. For conversion into MathML, a TeX > source generally doesn't have enough information since even presentation > MathML code contains much more structure than ordinary TeX source code does. > > So using TeX as a general language for math is a very bad idea, in my opinion. > The problem is that there is no good language which provides enough > structural information for conversion into MathML and is at the same time > simple to write and read. Maybe, both requirements contradict. > > Best wishes, > Wolfgang > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe