Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haddock Markup

Am Samstag, 7. Februar 2009 13:46 schrieb Khudyakov Alexey:

On Friday 06 February 2009 21:24:35 Andy Smith wrote:

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2009/2/6 Wolfgang Jeltsch :

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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.

ASCIIMathML [1] is designed to do this. It doesn't cover everything in Presentation MathML, and makes no attempt to handle Content MathML, but you can do quite a lot with it. The notation has a formally defined grammar and rules for conversion to MathML [2].

[1] http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/asciimath.html [2] http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimathsyntax.html

TeX aim is presentation quality not structural information. And it's rather good at it. If one want really good looking formulae TeX is the answer.

This is only true if your destination format is PDF, DVI or PS. For a webpage, you’ll need MathML in the end and TeX is not so good in producing MathML, I suppose.

ASCIIMathML is nice but its produce not so good looking formulae.

How can you say that in general? ASCIIMathML can be converted into several formats (in principal) and is usually converted into MathML. And the rendering of MathML depends very much on the browser, plugin or whatever. Are there general deficiencies in ASCIIMathML or its usual conversion into MathML that prevent any MathML renderer from doing a good job? Or is it just a problem with your concrete MathML renderer?

I've tried it some time ago and found it clearly inferior to TeX. It gives too little control over presentation.

If you want a format suitable for multiple output formats (including more strucuture-oriented ones like MathML) than control over presentation is probably not what you want.

I wasn't able even to place integration indices exactly over and under integral sign.

In my opinion, you should just say what the indices are and the renderer should place them correctly. If it doesn’t, it’s a failure of the renderer, not of ASCIIMathML. Best wishes, Wolfgang