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
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