RE: [Axiom-developer] pamphlet support on MathAction

[Bill Page]

Martin,

On Wednesday, October 13, 2004 6:28 AM you wrote:
> > Bill Page address@hidden wrote:
> > > Martin,
> > > 
> > > I am sorry that I do not have anything integrated with 
> > > MathAction yet. I ran into a few problems with my
> > > modifications of the l2h (latex to html)noweave -filter
> > > and am still making changes to fix this before adding it
> > > to LatexWiki.
> 
> I do understand now that it is indeed a major effort. In 
> fact, I was quite astonished about your approach: I would
> have added a "pamphlet" style that accepts pamphlet files
> only, generates the latex via the document command, then
> the html via l2h or latex2html or hevea or whatever.

But that *is* almost what I am doing. What you call 'document'
is just noweave with a couple of Axiom specific options. l2h
is called as a filter from inside noweave to do the html
conversion. But l2h does not do a reasonable job of converting
equations to html. So what I decided was to use those features
of LatexWiki that already do essentially just this part of the
LaTeX conversion alone. The output of my modified l2h filter is
just the HTML+Latex format of LatexWiki.

> (hevea would be an especially nice option: the pictures take
> a long time to load)

It is true that the LaTeX generated images take a comparatively
long time to load. But most people seem to think that hevea
does a pretty awful job of converting LaTeX equations to HTML.
The fact that it (sort of) does it at all is a kind of miracle
since HTML was not designed to display mathematics. That is
the function of the mathML extension of the language. The *best*
why would be to convert LaTeX equations to mathML. But mathML
is still not supported widely and might not really be identical
to the LaTeX generated result that everyone expects.

> 
> So, in short, I think that Bob's approach is the one to go.

I agree in the long run. But it will take some time to get
there and then to add the Axiom and Reduce functionality etc.
Another few days of my time (when I get time) will probably
be all that is needed to get the current approach working.
 
> By the way: also the dollar-sign poses problems in
> StructuredText+LaTeX and has to be escaped in
> single-quoted text...

Yes. But not such special escaping will be required in
the pamphlet files themselves - it is only necessary
internally between the l2h filter and the LatexWiki
HTML+Latex format.

Regards,
Bill Page.