[Axiom-developer] RE: tex4ht and jsmath

[Page, Bill]

Eitan, 

On Saturday, October 15, 2005 2:05 PM you wrote:
> Bill Page wrote:
> > If I were to attempt to change the mathml.4ht config file
> > myself can you suggest some documentation/tutorial to get me
> > started quickly?
> 
> Take a look at the literate source tex4ht-mathml.tex of
> mathml.4ht, available at the bugfixes distribution branch.

Thanks for the pointer to the source and documentation.

I took a look at this file but this sort of LaTeX coding is
way past my level of incompetence! I will be very happy if
or when you have time to modify it to create a jsmath mode! :)

In the meantime I did download and install Tex4ht on the
Axiom-developer web server to try to gain some understanding
of how to use it. I installed the Debian version:
'tex4ht_20050402.1817-1_i386.deb' from your web site.

I tried it in MathML mode on several files. Some are nearly
ok, i.e. they display properly in Firefox with only minimal
hand editing of a dozen misplaced <msub> </msub> start and
end tags. But our "acid test" - a pamphlet file called
'dhmatrix.spad.pamphlet', which can be processed by dvipdfm
to a good quality pdf file - fails quite miserably with many
oddly placed MathML tags ... :( As a result I gave up trying
to hand edit it to get the browser simply to parse the XML.

In fact of those TeX to HTML/MathML systems that I have tried
so far, Hevea, Tth, and Tex4ht; none have successfully processed
this file in a manner that I would judge to be acceptable to an
online reader.

So, for now I guess I remain stuff with making due with the
Acrobat browser plug-in.

Best regards,
Bill Page.